 Indeed there is something odd about the very idea of a disguised optative. Of course, it is possible to give orders or express wishes by means of sentences that are grammatically in the indicative mood. Henry IV’s “You have good leave to leave us”, is grammatically in the indicative but it is merely a slightly less curt variant of the obviously imperative “Worcester, get thee gone” (Shakespeare, Henry IV, 1.3). But when we use indicatives to express wishes or convey commands we are engaging in communicative acts which would misfire badly if the people we were talking to failed to get the point. Even if King Henry had confined himself to “You have good leave to leave us”, omitting the explicitly imperative “Worcester, get thee gone”, Worcester would have had to be singularly obtuse not to realize that he was being ordered to leave. Competent speakers are usually well aware when a grammatically indicative sentence is being used to give a command or express a desire (indeed, this is one of the criteria of linguistic competence!). But it is Russell’s hypothesis that, despite appearances, “X is good” (in the sense of good as an end) is exclusively in the optative mood even though, for most people, it is neither intended nor interpreted as such. We have been good-ing and bad-ing things up and down for hundreds of years whilst radically misunderstanding the meanings of our own utterances. To suppose this is to suppose that meaning is independent of our collective intentions, which is a very large dead rat to swallow. Russell might reply that our usage belies our stated intentions, that we use “X is good” as if it were in the optative, and that despite our protestations to the contrary, his theory provides the best explanation of our actual use. The problem with this reply is that it is based on an obviously false premise. We don’t in fact use “X is good” as if it were in the optative mood—we treat as if it were truth-apt. This brings me to the most obvious and perhaps the most compelling objection to emotivism—what I like to call the Duck Argument.