Frank Masi/Sony PicturesEighty-nine-year-old Erma Lancaster's chance sighting of a Los Angeles city bus advertising the video release of Will Smith's Hancock is creating a national stir among scholars and academics. The ad's tag line reading "Will Smith is the baddest action hero yet!" left the senior confused and frustrated.
"Why would anyone brag about being the least successful at something?" queried Lancaster. "It's not even proper English, for goodness sake."
"To our knowledge, Lancaster is apparently the last remaining person unaware of street slang," stated Prof. Remington Pine of the Institute for American Language Studies. "Somehow she's been able to retain fundamental, non-ironic word usage skills, despite the complete bastardization of the English language that's taken place over the last three decades."
Lancaster has been submitted to intense linguistic examination. "She actually believes terms like retarded, sick and f--ked up are all pejorative," said Pine. "We asked her to explain the sentence, 'Jay-Z lays down some serious s--t,' and she assumed the man had suffered a strained bowel movement. It's uncanny."