Horace and Cicero can turn in their grave. What every serious classicist needs to get his iambic pentameters around are sui ipsius nudatur (stripper), abscena observandi cupidus (her client), and iuvenis voluptarius (the playboy).
Or so thinks father Carlo Egger, one of the Vatican's top Latinists, author of a new dictionary containing 15,000 contemporary words aimed at proving that Latin is not a dead language.
Lexicon, Recentis Latintas has been eight years in the making, trying to translate concepts into their direct Latin equivalents, but more often veering off into tongue-twisting explanatory paraphrases.
For the Vatican, which still uses Latin as its official language, father Egger's efforts were anything but a dry academic exercise.
How else could vatican officials order a few million more instrumentum telehornamentis exceptorium (videotapes) to be produced of the Pope's latest visit to Brazil?
Compilers of the dictionary were undaunted by technological progress and have words for Sellotape, fasciola glutinosa; wagon-lit, currus dormitorius; spray, Liquor nubilogenus, and Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), translated as res inexplicata volans.
Other modern concepts get a look-in, too. The western comes across as fabula americae occidentalis, a television advertisement as intercalatum laudativum nuntium, and a VIP simply as amplissimus vir. The word snob, originally a reduction of the Latin phrase sine nobilitate, is now rendered into modern Latin as novissimorum morum affectator.
The dictionary also helps to get a handle on modern sports. Alongside tennis, manubriati reticuli ludus, the slalom, for example, is elegantly rendered as descensio flexuosa.
According to some experts, Father egger has been wasting his time. "Latin gives expression to a historically defined culture," said Dr Michele Coccia, professor of Latin literature at La Sapienza University in Rome. "The culture of today must speak another language: modern scientific, philosophical or political concepts are untranslatable."
Father Egger, who remembers the time before the Second Vatican Council, when even lessons in physics were conducted in Latin, is undaunted. He declared: "The Latin language is nor dead. Quite the contrary. Together with Greek, it remains the fount of true culture."