There are scarcely any words that aptly describe what went down Friday night in Paris.
Oh, we have the vocabulary. It's there, waiting to be deployed for moments like this. The weekend's events certainly check all our verbal boxes: awful, terrible, terrifying, gruesome, horrific, despicable. Plenty more terms apply, too.
But those are just words. If you were there, you didn't get shot at by words. You didn't get taken hostage by concepts or constructs. Those weren't consonants and vowels being fired in restaurants, zipping by your head, turning visions of your own mortality from abstract to concrete.