I was thinking that opera tickets are so expensive that most people in this
mud probably couldn't afford them, so I decided to pick one and tell you
about it. I've chosen the opera Carmen by Bizet because I thought that an
opera about men with cars might be interesting. After all, most operas are
about weddings or other love stories and weddings are never interesting
unless someone dies and technically that would make it a funeral and not
a wedding. So I decided to take a look at this Carmen opera when I realized
that it doesn't tell about any men and doesn't tell about cars. In fact
Carmen happens to be a name of some gypsy woman. As gypsies and women are
something that I know nothing about, I'm just going to tell you about
names and the automobile enthusiasts.

So, it seems everybody has a name. In the opera the girl's name is Carmen.
The personal name is something that we humans use, but who knows why? I didn't
come up with it. In my case my parents did, but I'm wondering who came up
with the concept of names in the first place? I do not have an answer to
this, but it turns out that dolphins also use names to identify each other so
perhaps it is something very typical of intelligent creatures to come up
with names. And typical of us humans too.

When discussing about names, I remember reading this health slogan somewhere
that said "You are what you eat". This is actually a fun concept. You might
think that it's a quite new slogan and it was introduced by some health
officials or perhaps some organization. If you think so, you're wrong. This
principle has been in use from the ancient times. For example if we take
a closer look at the crusades where Richard the Lionheart fought against
Saladin, we can already infer that it's very likely that during those
long journeys Richard was travelling through Northern Africa where he
probably met a lion and ate its heart. Saladin, as a devoted Sunni Muslim,
would not of course eat pork and preferred to eat fruits and vegetables
and it's believed that the word "salad" actually comes from the respected
sultan's name. It's also a common misconception that the God banished
Adam and Eve from paradise because Eve ate a fruit from the tree. The real
reason they were banished was that Eve refused God's will when God wanted
Eve to call herself with the fruit's name. So this principle dates back
to biblical times.

While the concept is awesome, it has its drawbacks and it has led to many
different kinds of confusions. For example in 1972 when an aeroplane
crashed in the Andes and the survivors had to eat other passengers who had
already perished, the officials weren't sure which passport the survivors
were now allowed to use. Should they keep their previous passport or would
they start using the passport of the person they ate, if you're in fact
what you eat? The bureaucracy became difficult also if you had eaten
multiple people. Multiple person consumption is also the reason why they
have hyphen names nowadays, such as Jean-Claude van Damme.

The old naming convention was very confusing when people only had their
first name. For example today I ate a hamburger so you'd call me hamburger
but if I eat a pepper steak tomorrow, I'd have a different name once again.
After few days I'd be more difficult to track down than Matt Damon in
those Bourne movies. That's the reason why surnames were invented.

The surnames have quite a history as well. Like mentioned, the surnames
were invented so that you could tell different people apart because
they kept changing their names. Typically surnames don't change although
in some countries they did at first when surnames were used to describe
a profession for example, like John Butler. But nowadays surname is
basically hereditary. The men kept their names, but women had to take
the man's surname. The reason why women take the surname of their husband
has a long history. Generally it is believed that most people were pissed
off that we could no longer live in paradise because Eve selfishly refused
to change her name based on the "you are what you eat"-principle. When
the surnames were invented, someone proposed that women should be forced
to change their surname just out of spite. If Eve didn't do it in the past,
this surname change thingie on the day they're getting married sure will
act as a reminder, they thought.

Times have changed after that and the men have given new rights to women
in the 20th century. These rights include many trifling things such
as suffrage, but what is worth mentioning is the right to use hyphen names
such as Mary Jameson-Murray, for example. This new naming custom brought
relief to many women that they no longer had to take their husband's name
but this system wasn't without faults. If we look back to the beginning
of the article, you remember Carmen the name and the "car men", right?
That's right, here's where the car enthusiasts join the article. Somewhere
before and after 20th century there was two German guys with the names of Karl
Benz and Gottlieb Daimler who were some bad-ass automobile enthusiasts. They
were the guys who we credit for building the first automobiles. Although
the automobile industry will proudly hail their names now, it wasn't as easy
for them in the past. Their company was called as "Daimler-Benz" and
after the introduction of hyphen names many believed they were a gay
couple and it didn't take long when people were starting to give odd looks
and may I remind you that gay couples were not as accepted as they are
today. It certainly didn't help that they were German, because if you have
two guys, a sauerkraut and a lederhosen, people are starting to talk.

Nowadays we don't of course use this silly "you are what you eat"-principle
or we don't take it very seriously. There are some people, mainly celebrities,
who still find some nostalgia from the old principle and think it would
be nice to bring back the simpler times. Examples of such people include
Kevin Bacon (obviously not a Sunni muslim based on his name) or Gwyneth
Paltrow who named her daughter Apple. So you might say that some celebrities
still use this principle as do some members of the religious orders who
still believe in it because the origins of it is in the Bible. Nonetheless,
I believe times might be changing. The number of atheists has grown in
the recent years, because many people who do not have strong enough faith
find the principle terrifying and thus choose atheism regardless of the
fact that most priests don't eat their own father and Mother Teresa
probably didn't eat her own mother.

A wise woman once told me that it's not "you are what you eat.", but instead
"you are what you don't poop.".