Other news outlets have followed suit. The administration doesn’t like the word presumably because it ramps up anxieties about a situation the urgency of which it wants to play down. Biden’s right-of-center critics like the word because they believe its use shows that Donald Trump was right to talk about the need for a “beautiful wall.”

Fair enough. Politics, they say, ain’t beanbag.

But I like the administration’s decision to drop the word for another reason. Everything these days is called a “crisis,” and if everything is a crisis, then the word has lost all meaning, and nothing is a crisis.

It took no more than two minutes to find these references in recent news articles, and then I stopped, figuring the results alone would make the point: financial crisis, housing crisis, mental health crisis, pension crisis, public safety crisis, water crisis (Flint, Michigan), power crisis (Texas), humanitarian crisis (Ethiopia), COVID-19 crisis (India), climate crisis (entire world, possibly universe).

There’s even a Western crisis, which isn’t about the decline in good movies about cowboys, apparently, but has something or other to do with wild horses.

It is time for a moratorium on calling things crises, just so the word can get a much-needed rest and we can get a much-needed rest from it. Once some time has passed, and the word returns — but only after much thoughtful consideration by its employers — maybe it will have a little spring in its step and actually mean something again.

There’s little reason to think this will happen, though, because the cable news shows rely on it so heavily to keep the rest of us suckers tuned in. It’s hard to imagine what Wolf Blitzer, for example, would do if he couldn’t use the word. The self-serious CNN anchor might have to find another line of work altogether. Of course, he would have to change careers, too, if he couldn’t say “indeed.” Worse things could happen.