I’m tired of hearing that the current spike in inflation is “transitory” — not because I doubt the underlying economics of the claim, but because the ever-more-common usage is devaluing a precious word.

Officials at both the U.S. Federal Reserve and the White House have been using the word for months. So have their critics. Inflation, says Senator Joe Manchin, isn’t “transitory” because it’s “getting worse.”

Maybe; maybe not. What’s surely getting worse is the overuse of “transitory” to mean “temporary.”

A California court explained last week that a defendant on trial for possessing a firearm can counter the charge by showing that he had the weapon “only for a momentary or transitory period.”

The Grammar Curmudgeon is alarmed to discover that “transitory” has become a hifalutin’ way of saying “temporary” — particularly because of the tendency of language inflation to devalue words by obscuring their traditional meanings. In the case of transitory, we’re losing a nuance we ought to preserve.

Cue the Oxford English Dictionary. The first definition of “transitory” might seem to match the word’s current popular usage: “Not lasting; temporary; brief, fleeting.” But the editors of the OED, before proceeding further, append a telling note: “In early use, often in Christian contexts, contrasting life in this world with the (eternal) afterlife.”

Again, the point of “transitory” is to emphasize not merely the evanescence but the unimportance of our present existence. It prompts us to turn our thoughts toward what truly matters, because we ourselves are in motion, in transit from one world to the next. We’re living in a way-station. So commonplace was this understanding that at the 1817 funeral of Princess Charlotte, daughter of the future King George IV, the celebrant even titled his sermon “The Transitory Glory of the World.”

Preachers eventually applied this trope to far more than the mystery of death, using the word to remind audiences of the fugitive quality of what seems at a given instant of such fundamental importance. “The student is transitory at the college,” wrote a Pennsylvania pastor in 1906. “Soon he is gone and the institution remains.” But time also works its magic on the institution itself: “As the centuries come and go, the college itself becomes transitory and passes away.”

Thus we see the secular meaning of this traditional usage: Do not be so concerned about the troubles of the moment, the word advises us; they are unenduring. The deeper significance is that which worries us at any given instant is unimportant in the grand scheme.

If this is what economists, central bankers and elected officials have in mind when they call inflation “transitory,” they should say outright that they think the public is upset about nothing. (And take the heat for saying so.) But if, as one suspects, hand they mean that they don’t expect the surge in prices to last, plenty of perfectly decent words are available: Temporary. Short-term. Fleeting.

When the subject is inflation, let’s stick with those. When we’re talking about bigger stuff — say, the nature of humanity’s existence — then we can use “transitory.”

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.