I love ontological semantics...

What is crisis?

We can describe crisis within the scope of a particular situation that we define fully. There is a big difference between the scope and definition of the crisis at homeland security, and the fact I'm creating a crisis ruining my daughters life on a daily basis (according to her).

We can define what is NOT a crisis within the scope of a particular situation (everything is fine, cue the Jimmy Buffet music, Margaritas for everybody).

We can look at what is like a crisis (me ruining my daughters life, my son actually buying a car, Manson escaping prison) and come up with similarities in the situations.

We can look at the make up of the word and define it according to common use. Likely making nobody happy and arguing much.

On most message boards we can just put up a Wikipedia entry and call it good, of course I'll go edit the wiki entry to say (and john doe is a fool too).

In ontologies we can look at what kind of object it is, verb, noun, etc.. define it as a mental object, physical object, etc. and keep on going.

Chances are the word is an over used modifier in most peoples languages and it has NO meaning. That's a hard one to accept but it becomes true of buzz words rapidly. Leading of course to euphemisms and other perversities of language.