Although it was soon suggested to me that the word referred to the threelegged stools on which students formally sat their examinations, I thought it was typical of Cambridge that the English Tripos should be divided into only two parts. In my first weeks there, I was asked to go for a supervision on Chaucer with a supervisor who lived in an outlying village called Coton. Having been to the bookshop and bought a second-hand Chaucer which turned out on inspection to be a nineteenth-century translation, I jumped on my bike and made off in the general direction of where I thought the village might be. If I had asked my way in the part of Lancashire I came from, I would have been showered with too much help. On this occasion the natives were surly and uncommunicative when I enquired of several of them where Cotton was. If any of them twigged that I was pronouncing the word wrongly, they were not going to let on. The single ‘t’ in the real name of the village does perhaps suggest ‘coat’ but, although the confusion may on that occasion have been my fault, I take no blame for the bafflement I felt initially when several people I met referred to a college called ‘Keys’. It took me some time to realise that this was Gonville and Caius. These linguistic traps were everywhere in Cambridge and once they were mastered, you yourself could stand by and watch the uninitiated fall into them. I suppose Caius/Keys could be celebrated as a quirk of history which has left its mark on the language (like the use of Tripos), but it comes about because the founder of the college, who was plain John Keys, wanted to latinise his name. I discovered a more extreme case of a similar phenomenon when I read a biography of the Earl of Southampton – the man to whom Shakespeare dedicated his two long poems – and found that the family name had originally been Writh before an ancestor who died in 1504 decided that it would look more aristocratic spelt Wriothesley.