Any words that appear in a dictionary make cracking a password that much easier. Even with trivial replacements like capital letters and symbols. A true strong password should consist of 8 or more characters and be part of a "passphrase". A passphrase consists of a phrase that has special meaning to you, therefore making it easier to remember your password. Something along the lines of:
Homer Simpson for President. I am serious!
From this you can easily extract the first letter of each word, giving you:
hsfpias
That's a fairly hard password to crack, but it's too short. Make it harder by using the punctuation from the sentence.
hsfp.ias!
Now that is a hard password to crack. But let's step it up a bit more by capitalizing some letters and adding some numbers, say, the year I was born:
HSfp.ias!71
Voila, a truly difficult password to crack, but is still easy to remember. Feel free to liberally assault it with non-alphanumeric character replacements for greater difficulty (but a bit of "unwieldiness").
In your face, Space Coyote!