Right on the tip of my tongue

Do you know when you're having a conversation and you know the exact word that describes what you're talking about but you just can't think of it. Then you try to google but you're not exactly sure how to describe the word you're looking for so google is being really unhelpful. Last night I was talking about the large number of celebrities in their twenties having meltdowns and how I thought their upbringing in the public eye, in part, contributed to this. I was saying that because they did not have a normal upbringing they were basically more inclined to act like idiots or go crazy in their early twenties because for them, the society they were living in, was breaking down. Possibly not my most coherent line of thought but it was late and I should have been asleep so it was never going to my best work. I had the word I was searching for on the tip of my tongue and I was convinced it was pretty common and it began with a. Apparently that and a vague notion of what your theory actually means is not really enough to complete a successful google search. But I did not do the logical thing and drop it because I knew it would come to me later as soon I stopped trying to think so damn hard about it and a mere 15 minutes of online searching later I found it.

As it turns out the word was not all that common and I hadn't actually encountered it since studying sociology in college. It was Anomie and it's not so much a word as a sociological theory. It is defined as a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or lack of purpose and ideals.  Thank you, Emile Durkheim, for that one. Who knew it would one day come in handy. I think this describes the situation in which young celebrities find themselves pretty accurately. For the most part they are not behaving normally because they don't have a clear idea of what normal is and as such are not entirely responsible for some of the woeful acts of stupidity they commit publicly. I wonder how long that would have taken me if I didn't have a smartphone. 

I have been doing this for as long as I can remember. A word, a person , a place and you know its there within the recesses of your mind but you just can't reach it. It's like an itch that urgently needs to be scratched but you can't get to it. Naturally it's more satisfying when you work it all out in your own head but I find now that I constantly have my smartphone handy, I do a lot less actual mental legwork on this.

It is very rare nowadays that I will have one of those moments where I recognize an actor from somewhere, can't work out where and don't have an answer within a minute or two. Thank you kindly Internet movie database. I do still remember before the internet was so accessible and you might spend hours with that niggling feeling because you were so close to getting the word or the name but never quite reaching it. Your friends would be giving you unhelpful suggestions because they wouldn't be quite sure what you were mentally searching for and it would either come to you late at night as you were trying to fall asleep or you would find yourself ringing the one person who might actually have the answer to hand.

 I know a friend of mine once took a call from her brother at 2am because they had been naming teletubbies and he couldn't think of the name of one and was certain she would know. Now in our internet age that's pretty much a thing of the past and I think for the most part that's a good thing. It leaves me with more time to right all the wrongs in the world ( through a good healthy debate, of course) or do other more important things like sleep.