German 4 Dummies: Doping & Burn-out

Indeed, if you are literate enough to find this post, you already know another two German words with exactly zero learning effort, congratulations!

Well done!

The German words are Doping (neutral, das) and Burn-out (masculine, der). Doping, of course, is most widely known as a practice in sports, but Germans use it also to denote the use of stimulants of various kinds in everyday life, specifically medication that enhances your work abilities.

German experts use the term "pharmakologisches Neuro-Enhancement" (pharmaceutical neuro enhancement), which incidentally expands your German vocabulary by two more impressive words!

You are on a roll today, aren't you?

You use your new German words "neuro" and "enhancement" in exactly the same way as in English. You got that, guys?

The goodies modern Germans can get prescribed by their doctors are the usual suspects: anti depressants, beta blockers, anything that is or works like Aderall (tm), and more.
According to the article linked to above, some 6.7 percent of Germans admit having used this sort of doping in a work setting. Unsurprisingly, the ladies are said to go for the mood enhancers while the gents want power boosters.

Germans have made a derivative verb from the noun doping, "dopen".

Usage in the present tense:
ich dope nicht [that's the blogster affirming abstinence]
du dopst
er dopt
sie dopt
es dopt **
wir dopen
ihr dopt
sie dopen

** If you speak any German at all, you may be wondering how "it" can engage in doping. You can use the it form as a neutral generalized, colloquial expression, for instance, "Es dopt in Deutschland" (roughly: Germans are doping).

However, you should really avoid using the verb form "dopt" in most of East Germany and some areas in the West because dialects abound in which an initial "d" sounds like a "t" and a final or penultimate "p" easily reaches your ears as a "b".

The combined effect of the morphed sounds then is a "tobt", which means he/she/you is/are raging.

Use this comedic device at your own risk, especially if the target is on Aderall or something that starts with Meth....

A number of Germans engaging in this form of doping do so to counter the effects of Burn-out. There is a native German word using the exact same image of burning (ausgebrannt) but do not use it, it sounds too old fashioned.

You don't need it because you already know burn-out but more importantly, burn-out signifies that you got to this deplorable stage of existence through super human effort in the pursuit of everything that makes life worth living.

The German term is more quaint, more like "spent", which you can be after walking a quarter mile on a gentle downward slope - you get the point.

Since some self styled Christian conservative Germans are still furious about the fact that their government introduced a minimum wage decades after the rest of civilization, we would like to give them a hitherto unheard argument against the minimum wage: if people earn the minimum wage, you can be sure that some of them will use it to buy dangerous pharmaceutical neuro enhancers with the extra money.