In its title and in its wise, moral lyrics Nat King Cole's song Straighten Up And Fly Right was just the right choice, what with its reference to flights (Mrs Bishop is accused of doing lots of flying at public expense) and its lecture to us all to do what's right and to be straight in all our dealings.

We wished Bronwyn Bishop had been there in the packed theatre (for the Music At Midday concerts are always eerily popular) to hear it and for singer Fiona Wilkins (a vision in red silk) to wag a finger at the squirming ex-Speaker.

The Music At Midday concerts always raise shekels (admission is by gold coin) for a chosen cause. This year's beneficiary was the UnitingCare Canberra City Early Morning Centre that supports vulnerable people, who include the city's ever-increasing flock of homeless.*

We are great fans of the Music At Midday concerts and in recent years have never missed the opportunity to go to them and to report them. And yet we always do so feeling a pang (of the kind never felt by our parliament's entitlements rorters) of guilt that we are being paid to have such fun. But at least it is always our own gold coin that we donate and nor have we ever (as the Bronwynbishopesque parliamentarians might) thought ourselves entitled to be reimbursed for this expense incurred in the course of work.

Music At Midday tragics though we are, we winced at the discovery, as we took our seat among Tuesday's silver-haired concertgoers, that this was to be a concert of jazzy big band swing-era music. This is not our cup of tea and we braced ourselves for the worst.

And it (the worst) came and went mercifully early, with only the third number of the day, a brassy big band tormenting of Lennon's and McCartney's delicate Norwegian Wood. The song is a wistful little ditty about disappointment in romance and it should be protected from loud, vulgar, big band swing treatment in the way that dainty places are protected, by heritage-listing, from insensitive development.

But other than this fleeting outrage the concert was great fun. Even the opening national anthem was rather special with Fiona Wilkins' singing of it brought to a brassy climax by all that brass. Our hearts thumped with patriotism.

Highlights included Melody Neilsen's jazzy warbling of Ella Fitzgerald's Shiny Stockings, a tragic tale of hose fetishism. It relates how the man who has always loved Ella for her shiny stockings leaves her for a jezebel whose stockings are even shinier than Ella's. In the darkness of the theatre my silver-haired companions couldn't see how, thinking of my shameful sex's notorious fickleness in everything to do with love, the song brought a blush of self-recognition to my cheek.

Driving back (at our own expense) to the Fyshwick newsroom we passed the Jerrabomberra Wetlands, a haunt of ibises.

Those famous dictionarysmiths and wordmongers Oxford Australia like to nominate a new Word Of The Month that is cropping up in the Australian conversation.

It so happens that this month's just-announced new word/new expression defames a well-known-in-Canberra bird species usually called the Australian white ibis and sometimes the sacred ibis. Oxford says that an increasingly common name for the species is the derogatory tip turkey (tip as in rubbish tip) and that therefore tip turkey will get a guernsey in the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary.

Oxford explains that "Since the 1970s the bird has increasingly been found in urban centres ..."

"It has successfully adapted to the urban environment by scavenging on the food refuse of the human population. This scavenging habit has seen numbers increase in many city centres including Sydney's [yes, it is even common around Sydney's Central Railway Station where our photograph was taken].

"The interaction between humans and white ibises in urban areas in recent years has led to an increasingly disparaging view of this bird with a correspondingly negative vocabulary to describe it. Tip turkey is just one of a number of terms now used to describe the Australian white ibis. Others include bin chicken, dump chook, dumpster diver, and flying rat. Tip turkey, like bin chicken and dump chook, associates the ibis with stupidity, as well as with garbage and refuse. "The unflattering description of the ibis as a tip turkey is a relatively recent appellation, but one that has grown in frequency since the first evidence for the term in 2009. This has perhaps matched the growing presence of the birds and their scavenging habits."

Members of the Canberra Ornithologists Group, prompted by the Oxford Australia statement, have begun to chat among themselves about why white ibises have been driven to become so urban and so "brazen".

We will return to the subject ere long but meanwhile notice how the species' slow-motion fall from grace makes even Bronwyn Bishop's fall seem trivial by comparison for, as one of its common names remembers, once upon a time the discerning Egyptians thought of ibises as sacred creatures. Once upon a more recent time The Canberra Times published reverent poems about them (we have a fine one up our sleeve for another ibisy column another day). Now we are booing them and boganly calling them names.

*Support EMC via Facebook or by emailing emc@canberracityuca.org.au