scatter band
n.— «They’re known as a “scatter band” for their lack of formation.…“What happened was, we had a band director who was fired in 1963,” says Amit Aggarwal, who plays tenor sax. When a graduate student was brought in to lead the band, he said, “no one wanted to follow, and they went on strike.”» —“Stanford’s mad March” by Karen Lee Ziner Providence Journal-Bulletin (R.I.) Mar. 16, 1996. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Aubrey in Waco, Texas, says her mother used to warn the kids against contracting honkus of the bonkus, a fanciful name for a contagious disease. This colloquial term probably comes from the words bonk and konk, meaning “to hit” or...