I am not a big opera fan. I have been to a couple of performances of opera by music students on the local college campus. I still use compact discs to listen to music and they tend to put tunes into my head for a day or so. I find that hearing Pavarotti or somebody in advanced professional music often puts a pleasant and positive slant on my day. The Elixir of Love is an opera that I often listen to but only the first disc because by the end of that, I am ready to leave the kitchen, where our player is.
I happened to blunder into The Elixir of Love by Donizetti and more or less learned the first part thru repetition and the fact that the performance is in English. The album "Opera's Greatest Drinking Songs" includes the famous toreador song from the opera Carmen. You can hear it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5qmSEvDEGs but you have to wait for the preliminaries to be over before the familiar music plays.
I learned the words "Toreador, don't spit on the floor, use the cuspidora, that's what it's for" from somebody sometime. I don't have an impulse to spit on the floor or anywhere else but when I tried some chewing tobacco in the 6th grade, I learned that it is better to spit it out after some chewing. I swallowed it and got unpleasantly dizzy and sick. I have never been around regular tobacco chewers but I understand why they need to spit.
There has been much written and worried about ChatGPT and related software packages. I find that the available versions of Google Search can do a credible job of answering my questions without getting into much artificial intelligence (AI). I wondered who created the spitting words to Bizet's tune. I tried looking up the history of the alternate words and was bowled away by the number of links related to not spitting on the floor. I still don't know where the words came from.
