Why, as you get older, is it harder to immediately come up with the name of a familiar object, even when you know it very well and can even picture it in your head?
The phenomenon of being unable to recall the name of an object is referred to as anomic aphasia, anomic dysphasia or anomia. It can be caused by an injury to the left hemisphere or the brain, as well as neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.

It is theorized that names of both objects and people are more likely to be forgotten due to the fact that names are generally arbitrary. Meaning, aside from some factors such as gender, ethnicity or country of origin, it's not possible to derive a name out of context. For example, a person's occupation as a teacher isn't more likely to make them named Thomas than a construction worker. And while objects follow naming conventions and borrow words from languages such as Latin or Greek, those expressions do not follow hard rules either. As such, there is little information that can be used to associate a name with an object, as opposed to properties such as weight, size and texture, which can be estimated using many context clues.
Many studies show that it takes older subjects longer time to remember the name of an object. While this can be connected to detoriation of the hippocampus, isn't it also thought that one reason is simply that older people has essentially a larger database of terms stored in memory, making slower and more difficult to remember the name of a particular object?