A perfect word

Some words are just meant to be. One such is ‘magnificent.’ I can’t imagine it meaning anything other than what it does. It could never swap meanings with ketchup, say or bucket. Neither sandstorm nor pickle could mean what magnificent does.

I was flying from Omaha to Seattle yesterday afternoon and the diagonal route meant that we were over mountains for a goodly portion of the trip. Not mountains like the puckered up hills they call mountains in Kentucky or Virginia. Mountains worthy of the title. Valleys and peaks, canyons and crevasses, dry alluvial fans and bowls filled with pristine, above-the-tree-line snow. No roads or rails, just forest and millennial-carved stone, the impossibly sharp knife edge with the glare of snow blindness on the sun side and deep, mysterious shadow on the other.

Plateaus cut by fissures that gave way to canyons cut by snaking rivers flowing out of sight. Endless scrub that from 35,000 feet looks soft as the down on the back of a newborn fawn.

How could a word like ‘magnificent’ mean anything but this?