Multimangle, # 1

Not the first blog entry with multiple mangles, but one that justifies the creation of a new general category.

Extracted from the website for Heritage Open Days 2013:

Link: Heritage Open Days 2013, Cemex

The ‘ot’ obviously never met a spell-checker, a comma is needed after both tower, since there’s only one, and Church, while Mathews lacks both a possessive apostrophe and a second t.

To be fair, the church’s name presents a challenge elsewhere, including on its own community website, where it’s shown variously as 

Link: m2o Rugby

and

In the first instance, the abbreviation of Saint should not take a full stop since the word is not curtailed (in contrast to the St. used to represent Street). Instead, letters are missing from the middle, but it’s more usual simply to write St, rather than the strictly correct S’t (compare foc’s’le for forecastle), which looks both unwieldy and a little silly.

Both entries fail on possessive apostrophes. One has made no attempt to include any, while the latter correctly deals with St Oswald, but ignores the need to present St Matthew’s name in the possessive form. (Unlike Fortnum and Mason or Morecambe and Wise, the saints are not in a permanent partnership; thus if one requires an apostrophe, the other does too.)

The most sensible option, of course, would be to call it The Church of St Matthew and St Oswald: this is less of a tongue-twister and likely to involve less spitting when said aloud, and it removes the need for anyone to grapple with grammar when writing it down. This version is indeed what it says on the sign outside the church, and what the Archbishops’ Council’s A Church Near You website calls it, except for the hedging of bets when abbreviating saint:

Link: A Church Near You, St Matthew and St Oswald