We’re gonna rock around the hic haec hoc tonight

Rihanna performs (in English) during the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards at Madison Square Garden, New York

Speaking as someone who quoted Visage’s Fade to Grey in my French O-level and considers 99 Luftballons as my ultimate Desert Island Disc, I’m all for cultural crosspollination.

So I’m delighted to learn that some wacky academic has translated a load of pop and rock lyrics into Latin.

Aside from offering further proof of the Jacob Rees Mogg-ification of modern life, there’s something edifying about the youth of today flossing (look it up) and grinding to the venerable language of philosophy, church and court.

Not that there hasn’t been a touch of hic, haec, hoc in the charts before. The Pet Shop Boys did a great deal of electronic mea culpa-ing at the end of It’s a Sin, and who can forget Enigma’s number one Sadeness, with Latin lyrics lifted from Gregorian chant?

I’m looking forward to hearing what popstrels like Rihanna and Little Mix do with the language of Virgil, Ovid and Horace. Aere Perennius? We shall see, 2,000 years hence.