beautiful

"Too weak. Maybe use a different word like marvelous or splendid," a classmate commented on my paper, and as much as I respect the person, I disagreed.

The word beautiful is simply...beautiful, and no other word can quite convey the same chill I get when I say beautiful.
Don't get me wrong--I don't intend to demean other wonderful words like marvelous, fantastic, stunning, splendid, magnificent, and so on. But I get frustrated as some people order the words to express "the degrees of beauty," often the word "pretty" being on the bottom. In my opinion, they all express different kinds of beauty and there's no point of labeling one "higher" than another. To me, the word "beautiful" has a mild sense of breathtaking pleasure aesthetically and sometimes even morally.

When I watched the Canadian couple Scott and Tessa free dancing on ice, the only word that I could think of was "beautiful"--and they were. Simply beautiful. They danced, smiled, and held each other so gracefully on ice that I believed it all: that they were deeply in love with their dance, that they were enjoying every single second, and that every single movement was a part of who they were.

When I watched Kim Yu-Na figure skating last night, the word I could think of was "stunning." I held my breath throughout the performance despite the confidence she showed from the beginning. I prayed she wouldn't fall, that she would do the best she could. And when she was done, I found myself clapping and screaming in awe. Stunning, I thought. Absolutely stunning.

Both dances were outstanding yet they had different feel to them, and the words that came to my mind reflected it. Maybe it's just me. But I refuse to change the word I chose for my paper. I refuse to believe that the word "beautiful" is somehow weaker than "marvelous" or "splendid."

Beautiful.
I love the subtle chill the word offers.