The four random words were much more secure: e.g. Looking at my Avatar, one might pick "CrackerPonyFlipFlop". This kind of password is easier to remember AND more secure...and I guess I won't be using "CrackerPonyFlipFlop" anytime soon...
This isn't secure at all. A dictionary attack will find all 4 words just as easy as it will find one.
Basically you take the first letter C and go down in your dictionary file to all the words that start with C. Then look for all worlds that are Cr within that subset, then Cra, etc.
Once you've found Cracker you just take the next letter P and look for all the P words.
I'll give an example of how easy it is to do: Way back in my high school English class we have to figure out compound words by breaking them apart into the Greek and Latin roots, then getting the meaning of each part and putting those back together into a definition.
I did this in Commodore Basic in 1989/1990.