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That agonizing moment when you know precisely what you want to say but you fail to produce the word or phrase is known as a "tip-of-the-tongue" moment. Lise Abrams, a psychology professor at the University of Florida has studied the phenomenon for 20 years. Researchers have even found occurrences among sign language users--termed "tip-of-the-finger" states. Key findings: 1. Low-frequency use: We're more likely to draw blanks on words we use less frequently - like abacus or palindrome. 2. There are also categories of words that lead to tip-of-the-tongue states more often. Proper names are one of those categories. There's no definitive theory, but one reason might be that proper names are arbitrary links to the people they represent, so people with the same name don't possess the same semantic information the way that common nouns do, Abrams said.

If you've ever forgotten a word just as you were about to say it, you've experienced the Tip-of-the-Tounge phenomenon. Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is the subjective feeling that people have of being confident that they know the target word for which they are searching, yet they cannot recall this word. Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is one kind of metacognition (meaning you are aware of you're cognitive processes), that involves a feeling of knowing the word you're searching for. This phenomenon appear to occur when one is having a breakdown in the intermediate stage of lexical retrieval.

Prof. Bennett Schwartz: "In a tip-of-the-tongue state a part of our cognitive system called metacognition lets us know that even though we can't retrieve something at the moment it's probably there stored on our memory, and if we work at it we'll get it... the conventional idea is sort of like your brain's, like, a big complicated filing cabinet. This is telling us that that's not so true. You can't just go to the J file and find John there."

Many people experience moments of which certain words are "On the tip of their tongue." This is actually quite common and caused by the meaning of words, and the words themselves being stored in different areas of the brain. Bilingual people are found to experience this twice as much, especially with the less dominant language.

You know the word exists, and you know what it means, but you just can't spit it out. It's one of the most frustrating feelings. New research suggests the forgetfulness may have to do with how frequently we use certain words. The findings could help scientists understand more about how the brain organizes and remembers language.

Offering a written expression of condolence (from the Latin word condolere, to grieve or to suffer with someone) used to be a staple of polite society. "A letter of condolence may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical - never mind," advised the 1960 edition of Emily Post. "Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value." But these days, as Facebooking, Snapchatting or simply ignoring friends has become fashionable, the rules of expressing sympathy have become muddied at best, and concealed in an onslaught of emoji at worst. Just over two and a half million Americans die every year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and we buy 90 million sympathy cards annually, a spokeswoman for Hallmark said. But 90 percent of those cards are bought by people over 40. Take-away tips from the article: 1. BEING TONGUE-TIED IS O.K. 2. SHARE A POSITIVE MEMORY 3. NO COMPARISONS 4. DON'T DODGE THE 'D' WORDS 5. GET REAL. 6. FACEBOOK IS NOT ENOUGH