You Do Not Want to be Odor

I haven't posted in a while, so I'm going to take a couple of minutes to weigh in on an issue that I'm pretending not to care about, namely, the Terrell Owens saga. I'm not going to feign outrage over his actions, nor am I going to criticize the Eagles, his agent, the media, society, the NFL, or anyone else. I am going to criticize Right Guard deodorant for their stupid commercial where a bunch of college-aged guys are playing the fabled playground game "Red Rover" with Owens. In their version of the game, the human chain represents Right Guard Xtreme Sport Deodorant and Owens represents odor. I have no problem with their analogy, however hackneyed it may be, but in order to call Owens into their game, they yell out: "Red Rover, Red Rover, send T.O. over." This sentence difficult to speak, and listen to for that matter, due to the glottal stops between T, O, and over. It also breaks the rhythm of the classic Red Rover call.

The canonical form of the Red Rover call is "Red Rover, Red Rover, Send (two-syllable name) right over." Had they stuck with this form and called out "... send T.O. right over" it would be easier to say (assuming they removed glottal stop between T and O) and in the proper form. If they felt that they needed to deviate from the standard form, saying "send Terrell over" or "send Owens over" would have been better alternatives from a rhythmic standpoint. Of course, they had to say T.O. because T.O. is not just a nickname, it's a brand and the commercial was as much an advertisement for T.O. as it was for deodorant.