Pope to start tweeting in Latin

Details: 

Pope Benedict XVI plans to tweet in Latin, Vatican spokesmen have announced, resurrecting the dead language in a postmodern medium starting Sunday.

“Twitter is a tool which requires rapid communication,” Roberto Spataro, secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Latin Studies, told the Guardian U.K. “In English you say ‘the corruption of the best one is horrible.’ In Latin, three words suffice: ‘corrupt optima pessima.’’’

But if character conservation is one of the goals, it doesn’t always work. For example, “I can has cheeseburger?” becomes “Possum habere cheeseburger?” Not that the Pope would ever tweet anything so plebeian. (LOL!)

Pope Benedict XVI started tweeting from his official account, @Pontifex (that’s Latin, too), in December. The account has more than 1.4 million followers, as of press time.

And he’s tweeting in other languages, too.  Read all about it.