I'm not saying the words "elegant" or "beautiful" is wrong. I'm just saying from my experience, non-programmers think I'm a fanatic and give me funny looks when I say that. Could be the way I'm saying it :)
Sure I understand the problem with that word is it means so many things to so many people, it has an emotional element to it as such it is subjective to the group of people that use it. But I generally see it used in the context of code as being of simple form, so simple that it begets a beauty of it's own. A secondary definition I see from time to time is clever, which can be a albatross, clever code can be bad code and some people do use the term elegant for clever code but to me it is misapplied, clever code goes against elegance because it makes things more complex, so I tend to call clever code clever and simple code that is cleverly simple elegant.