Ground vehicles consistently have radio conventions that just don't fit into the aviation world. It feels like a contributor to this accident, you can hear the controller's brain skip a couple gears trying to understand the goofy word order from the truck.

Pilots and controllers speak the same language in the same order; ground vehicles just kinda say stuff.

The aviation-ized version of your proposal would be something like this:

> tower truck 1 short of 4 at delta, red status lights

That makes sense! I imagine the word order thing is just that ground vehicles are not aviation trained. They just happen to be in the same space.