Ms. Dowd is a productive, if needlessly neologistic, columnist for the New York Times.
From the Wikipeida entry: "Dowd's columns have been described as letters to her mother, whom friends credit as 'the source, the fountain of Maureen’s humor and her Irish sensibilities and her intellectual take.' Dowd herself has said, 'she is in my head in the sense that I want to inform and amuse the reader.' Dowd's columns are distinguished by an acerbic, often polemical writing style."
An assessment of whether particular words or phrases have become current is necessarily a subjective one, and dependent upon the size, distribution, and homogeneity of the population you are assessing. With that caveat, here is my subjective answer:
Dowd uses a slangy, conversational style that is quite distinct from written English. Her choice, and coinage, of words, seek to foster the sense of an ongoing, free-wheeling conversation among friends. As such, she uses words in the way that a "typical" New Yorker might in daily, spoken conversation.
On one hand, she will not wait until a phrase has become common or entered the lexicon before shes uses it in her column. On the other, she does not use jargon that is "of the moment" in the sense of being slangy teenager cant, New York city street patois, or passing fashionable curiosities. Writing for a broad audience, her style is to titillate and amuse, not confuse.
My sense is that the typical New York resident would understand the meaning and the spirit of her columns if read out loud, but would not choose to use those newly coined words or clever phrases in their own e-mail or written communciations.
Her use of the brand name PowerPoint, here as a verb, references the popular, and increasingly unpopular, software program from Microsoft. PowerPoint has acquired, in modern American English, a sense of organizational futility perhaps similar to the way "memo" did a half-century ago. When used in colloquial conversation, PowerPoint often implies either an overly bureaucratic (particuarly when excessive length or small font size are cited) or superficial treatment of the subject matter.
In creating the phrasal verb, Dowd chose "away" (she could just as easily have chosen "over", "out" or "to death", for example) in order to create a sense of breezy dismissiveness. Her choice is colored by other common phrasal verbs such as "whisk away" and "wish away", both of which have the twin senses of cursory attention and a desire to have the object minimized or disappear from the scene.
So, in summary, Ms. Dowd's constructions are coy, clever and comprehensible without being common, current or canonical.
sth? – Michael Hampton Aug 17 '12 at 3:09