I have to agree with the majority of native speakers on this thread, 'friendlily', even though listed by Oxford and Merriam-Webster, sounds awkward, and I have no problems with 'in friendly way', 'in a friendly manner' or 'in a friendly fashion' - http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=friendlily%2Cin+a+friendly+way%2Cin+a+friendly+manner%2Cin+a+friendly+fashion&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfriendlily%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cin%20a%20friendly%20way%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cin%20a%20friendly%20manner%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cin%20a%20friendly%20fashion%3B%2Cc0

As porsche has already mentioned, 'friendly' is by no means unique in this regard; there are quite a lot of adjectives ending in -ly that don't normally take an extra -ily. Here's one list of 37 of them - http://www.prepoceros.com/2005/10/13/testing/

Here are a few more to add to porsche's list:

bubbly, curmudgeonly, prickly, comely, manly, deadly , silly, chilly

Even though sillily and chillily do seem to exist (although being red-lined by Firefox) , I personally would never use them and would stick to the 'in a ~ way / manner' formula, and that's certainly what we teach our EFL students.

As for comparative and superlative, all the dictionaries I've checked (including Merriam-Webster, Oxford, American Heritage, Longman) list - 'friendlier, friendliest', none saying anything about 'more friendly'. This is only to be expected, as that is following the standard rule for two syllable adjectives ending in -y.

But it's certainly true that 'more friendly' is also used, and especially in the past - http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=friendlier%2Cmore+friendly&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cfriendlier%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bfriendlier%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BFriendlier%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cmore%20friendly%3B%2Cc0

In fact there are quite a lot of two-syllable adjectives where we have a choice:

clever, common, cruel, gentle, likely, narrow, pleasant, polite

We usually recommend students to take the 'more, most' route here (which seems to be becoming more common / commoner, but I would certainly use crueler, gentler, narrower.

As a native speaker, I must say that what you see as confusion I see as choice. Which is especially useful for creative writers: sometimes 'pleasanter' will fit better, sometimes 'more pleasant'. Variety is, as they say, the spice of life.

@jayles - good choice of parameters - to which I'd add - http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=she+has+an+issue%2Che+has+an+issue%2Cyou+have+an+issue&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cshe%20has%20an%20issue%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Che%20has%20an%20issue%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cyou%20have%20an%20issue%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Byou%20have%20an%20issue%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BYou%20have%20an%20issue%3B%2Cc0

I don't think the way people use it today, it is totally synonymous with problem, or at least only in certain contexts. Sure "Do you have an issue with that?" has to a certain extent replaced "Do you have a problem with that?", but that was always a very specific use of the word 'problem'. On the other hand, I don't think many people would say they were having an issue getting their car started in the morning.

Especially in the plural it can suggest baggage (history) of a certain type - the song "She's got issues" suggests a lot more to me than if it had simply been called "She's got problems".

These examples are from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary definition of "issue", under the subheading:

2 [countable] a problem or worry that somebody has with something

Money is not an issue.
I don't think my private life is the issue here.
I'm not bothered about the cost—you're the one who's making an issue of it.
Because I grew up in a dysfunctional family, anger is a big issue for me.
She's always on a diet—she has issues about food.
He still has some issues with women (= has problems dealing with them).
If you have any issues, please call this number.

As I said, I think that this is a very specific meaning of problem (apart perhaps for the first and the last last ones), and that "issue" is unlikely to replace the more standard meaning of problem. It may be an unfashionable view, but I believe that new words often become popular because they have a more precise meaning than existing ones - they fulfill a need.

As for the trend, and it doesn't seem to be a huge one, at least not in books, it seems to have started around 1990:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=problem%3Aeng_us_2012%2Cissue%3Aeng_us_2012.%2Cproblem%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Cissue%3Aeng_gb_2012&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cproblem%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cissue%3Aeng_us_2012.%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cproblem%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cissue%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0

@jayles - You're no doubt right about 'will' and 'shall' instead of present continuous with future meaning, but I'm not so sure about 'here comes':

Charlotte Bronté - Jane Eyre

is coming 1 - Tell her, Sam, a gentleman is coming
here comes / there goes 0

Emily Bronté - Wuthering Heights

is coming - 4
Don’t make more mischief; my brother is coming: be quiet!
Ah, he has caught a glimpse of us—he is coming in!
‘I’ve prayed often,’ he half soliloquised, ‘for the approach of what is coming
Catherine is coming, dear master!

here comes / there goes 0

Anne Bronté - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

is coming 2
He is coming to see me soon
But death will come—it is coming now—fast, fast!

here comes 2
and here comes my aunt to scold me
Ah, here comes one that will not rejoice at it!

'shall' is certainly used a lot, but mainly as an alternative to 'will' - in Jane Eyre there are around 260 instances, mostly in the first person, a couple with 'he/she' and around 20 with 'you'.

But the real way to sound Brontéesque is to have your characters ejaculate a lot:

Jane Eyre - 'he/she ejaculated' - 7
Wuthering heights - 'he/she ejaculated' - 5
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - 'he/she ejaculated' - 3

It's not well known that Santa has several brothers. There's a younger brother who is always giving into him, and so is known by the rest of the family as Concession Claus.

Another brother has so little time for the family that they don't really regard him as one of the them, calling him Nominal Claus. A third is always going around set on doing something or other, Purpose Claus,he's known as. And then there's Conditional Claus, the black sheep of the family, who is only accepted at family dos on the proviso that he behaves himself. And of course there's the one with the dimple on his chin, Cleft Claus.

Then there are those who have flown the roost, the independent Clauses, leaving behind all the small Clauses. And there's those teenage Clauses who go round saying things like 'He was like Hi and I was like Cool, and like How are you, man. Cool.' The Verbless Clauses, they're called.

And if you want to get in touch with any of them just ask Mrs Claus, she knows all their numbers and email addresses. Not for nothing is she known as Contact Claus.

@Harrycastle, belatedly - "In the French language, for example, the present perfect doesn't exist - rather they use a simple present. i.e. I have = j'ai and I have got = j'ai."

This is a double whammy, I'm afraid.

1. The 'I've got' construction is nothing to do with present perfect, of 'get' or anything else - so the 'j'ái' thing is neither here nor there. It's simply an idiomatic version of 'I have' which can only be used in the present; for other times we need to use 'have'. If 'I've got' was present perfect we would be able to use past simple and past perfect of 'get' with same meaning (which we patently can't):

She's got blonde hair = She has blonde hair

* When I first knew her she got brown hair - where did she obtain it from, I wonder?
- correct version - When I first knew her she had brown hair

* She had originally got black hair, apparently - again, where had she obtained it from?
- correct version- She had originally had black hair, apparently

Forget present perfect, it has nothing to do with it. Why is it that most foreign learners grasp this quite easily, but some native speakers just can't see the wood for the trees, I wonder?

2.French does have a tense constructed in the same way as present perfect - passé composé, which has two functions. In spoken French it is used instead of the passé simple to talk about the past. But its primary function is much the same as present perfect - "Le passé composé fonctionne normalement comme forme d'accompli dans le présent" (Grammaire du francais - Denis, Sancier-Chateau, Livre de Poche) - The passé composé functions normally as a form of completion in the present:

"Jusqu'á présent Paul ná écouté que de la musique classique"
"Up until now Paul has only listened to classical music."

http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/deviation

@jayles - "I never understood why the French for 'detour' is 'deviation' on all the roadworks".

French has two words - détour and déviation; 'taking the scenic route', for example, would be 'faire un détour', and 'détour' is also used for more permanent meanderings of rivers and roads. It seems to me that 'détour' is used for more deliberate or permanent situations, whereas 'déviation' is used more for temporary situations or those over which we have no control, such as those caused by road works, as is borne out by a quick look at Google Images, or when a plane has to make a detour, for example. However, this is just one of many meanings of 'déviation', which also shares several definitions with its English cousin.

Dictionnaire Altif :
http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/detour
http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/déviation

I'm not quite sure why you should be surprised, as both deviation / déviation come from Latin deviare "to turn out of the way". Spanish for detour, for instance, is the rather similar 'desviación', while in Portuguese it's desvio, and in Italian it's deviazioni. It seems to be specifically in English that 'deviation' has deviated away from its literal meaning to include only metaphorical and mathematical ones. The sexual meaning alluded to by HS is quite recent, 1912 according to Etymology Online. Nineteenth century examples seem to be mainly of the mathematical type.

Incidentally, Google dropped support for the plus operator some time ago. :)

Ah. The forgotten beauty of 'Road works ahead'.

@HS - and please keep feeding me these little titbits to research. These little oddities are grist to the mill as far as I'm concerned, and as I neither pay much attention to sports pages nor live in NZ I would miss a lot of them otherwise.

But just to play devils advocate - "road improvement" or "lane upgrade" would certainly explain why you were being held up, but they wouldn't give you the whole picture - that they are converting the road from two lanes to three. As far as I can see, this upgrade is a pretty major development for both the NZTA and the NZ government, and perhaps they want people to know that something significant is going on.

Incidentally, a lot of the hits I got were for online gaming: 'laning' seems to be something you do in two online games: 'DOTA 2' and 'League of Legends'.