Tips (the ends of things)
A visual essay concerning objects that come to an end. A work-in-progress.
Tip of the Tongue vs. the Mountain Peak
The phrase "on the tip of my tongue" tells us where tips are and differentiates "tips" from other endings. A word or name "on the tip of the tongue" is just out of reach, so close you taste it but not close enough to possess it fully. (Is this a clue to the underlying "feeling" of a tip - you can have them but not possess them?)
We do not call the top of a mountain, "the tip" (though we have been known to call it the "tippy top"), instead we call it "the summit" or "the peak". Both "peak" and "summit" suggest drawm. In everyday speech they describe the unusual, the intense, the superior or the extraordinary - a summit meeting, a saxophone summit, a peak experience, "at the peak of his/her performance", etc. These phrases refer to the top and use the spectrum of top and bottom metaphorically as evaluation. The top is the best and the bottom is the worst. As with most forms of evaluation, "peak" and "summit" feel definite. To ascend a mountain peak is to be there, whereas to ascend its tip is to be somewhere more precarious, like the angels struggling to stay balanced at the end of their pin. The missing word is "the tip of the tongue" is equally precarious, neither here nor there, like the tapering steeple hovering between its solid form and the "nothingness" of the air around it.