Farm machinery

The twentieth entry is il battitore, the threshing drum, and the noun is an agent name of the plainest kind: battere is to beat, and whatever beats is il battitore. Inside the combine it is the cylinder that knocks the grain out of the ear; on a cricket field the same word names the batter, and in baseball too. But it has a third life that no glossary of machinery will show, and an Italian newspaper uses it most weeks: un battitore libero. The phrase comes from football, where the sweeper stood behind the defence with no man to mark and no fixed station, free to go wherever the game went. Off the pitch it became the ordinary way of describing a politician, a reporter or a colleague who keeps to no line and answers to no whip — è un battitore libero del partito. English has to choose between « a maverick », « a loose cannon » and « a free agent », and the three are not interchangeable: the first admires, the second warns, the third merely describes a contract. Battitore libero carries all three tones at once and lets the sentence around it decide.