Updating categories for the second annual E2E Communication Awards (enter now, deadline May 22), I was corresponding with the founder of Communitelligence.com, old communication hand John Gerstner.

He suggested we strike "upward communication" off the category list, because no one would know what it means anymore. With great reluctance, I agreed with him. This term's currency up until about a decade ago demanded an answer from organizations to the question: So what apparatus do you have in place to deliver employees' ideas and opinions to management?

But just because communicators stopped using the term—and stopped ensuring that employees had an official vehicle by which to communicate "upward," to management—doesn't mean employees stopped having pungent opinions.

This devastatingly well-written e-mail to AIG's CEO appeared in today's New York Times.

Might these ideas have been vented earlier and more quietly if AIG had a communicator who knew what "upward communication" meant? We'll never know.

Postscript: Upward communication is the subject of my personal all-time favorite Onion headline:

"Best Buy's Employee Suggestion Box Brimming With Urine."

You ever read Nelson Algren? As I say in my latest Huffington Post piece, the late Chicago novelist is taking over my mind these days, and I'm not entirely pleased.

A couple days ago a local radio producer saw my HuffPo piece on the Ugliest Car in Chicago and got in touch to invite me to do a radio show that evening.

The host, she explained, "wants to do a segment on cars, specifically why he can't find a U.S. car maker that makes a COMFORTABLE car. He was disappointed when he went to the Chicago Auto show a few weeks back and only found foreign cars that he felt truly comfy in."

Of course I was more than eager to play foil to the host's grave lamentations about the domestic dearth of true vehicular comfort.

But I turned down the golden opportunity because the show was between midnight and 4:00 a.m., a time slot whose demographics my onetime overnight radio host nephew Dan Friend once described: "truckers passing through, and old people who are in too much pain to sleep."