smoking one's own dope
- idiom
- Archaic
:
hacerse daño a uno mismo
- The company started smoking its own dope and ignored customer feedback, leading to poor product design.
Examples
-
If you believe all your own hype, you're basically smoking your own dope.
-
He is always smoking his own dope by ignoring expert advice.
-
She cautioned him not to start smoking his own dope when judging his success.
-
Why do you keep smoking your own dope when it harms your career?
-
If you believe all your own hype, you're basically smoking your own dope.
-
She cautioned him not to start smoking his own dope when judging his success.
-
The company started smoking its own dope and ignored customer feedback, leading to poor product design.
Synonyms
20
8.4
Do or say something that harms your own chances
3
7.1
To do something that makes you fail
1
9.9
To feel too proud of your own work or ideas and ignore other people's advice
1
7.5
Cause trouble for yourself by your actions, often by accident
To believe your own praise so much that you make bad choices
To cause problems for yourself because of your actions
How Self-Defeating
10
5.8
- Informal
20
8.4
- Archaic
49
3.0
37
1.0
Surface Forms
Morphology
Literally the phrase is clearly compositional — ‘smoking’ + ‘one’s own’ + ‘dope’ will be read by a learner as inhaling their own drug — but the intended idiomatic sense of being self-defeating or falling victim to one’s own misguided ideas is a culture-specific, metaphorical extension that is not directly predictable from those constituents. A B1 learner who knows the words but has not encountered the expression is unlikely to infer the non-literal meaning, so the item functions as an opaque slang idiom.
Etymology
The idiom smoking one's own dope paints a clear picture: someone literally smoking their own dope and losing clear thinking. One popular idea is that this shows a person so taken by their own ideas that they hurt themselves, so the phrase means 'acting in a way that harms yourself' or 'believing your own praise'.