Whether burgeoning from the web of new words on the Internet, the fluid language of the drug culture, or the brutal and ironic parlance of the Vietnam and Gulf wars, these verbal inventions have carved their places in the vernacular. The vitality of American slang is reflected in such recent coinages as digerati (digital equivalent of literati), spam (to deploy mass postings on the Internet), and phat (good, cool). And the flexibility of the language has given rise to a mountain biker's claims to feeling hammered (exhausted, beaten to a pulp), the Pentagon br