International sports stars are often required to speak to the media after their performances. When Tiger Woods does so, it is noticeable that he makes use of the formulaic expression ‘I feel/felt like I’ as a means of introducing descriptions of, or generalizations about, his actions or motivations. Drawing on corpus data, this paper offers some observations about this expression in relation to its use by speakers (and to a lesser extent writers) of both American and British English, and also investigates the apparent disparity in frequency between instances of ‘she’ and ‘he’ when it is used.

Favourite etymologies from the world of tennis. At the mere mention of summer most of us think only of one thing: Wimbledon. And at the mere mention of Wimbledon everybody thinks of tennis. A summer without a Wimbledon tennis tournament is just about as unthinkable as fish without chips, Romeo without Juliet or the telly without Coronation Street. For two weeks at the height of summer the nation will be gripped with tennis fever. Matches will be played and replayed on our screens day and night and every volley, fault or service analysed by pundits and experts who convince us they know what they are talking about. But where did this game that spellbinds us for a fortnight come from?