The storyteller's use of sentences does not in fact satisfy the conventional requirement for normal use, but he speaks as if they did, and thus obtains his effects. … We might say ‘There are no ogres’ comfortingly to the crying child who has heard the storyteller say ‘Some ogres are wicked’, or we might say it admonishingly to the storyteller. And in either case we are doing something more radical than saying ‘That is false’ but less radical than saying ‘That has no sense’; we are saying ‘That applies to nothing’. We could contradict ‘Some ogres are wicked’ by saying ‘That is false: no ogres are wicked’, but contradiction is a colder comfort than what we provide with ‘There are no ogres’, for it leaves the child to face ogres with qualities other than wickedness. ‘There are no ogres’ cuts deeper at the roots of fear: it points out that the existential conditions for a serious statement which can be graded as either true or false are not on this occasion satisfied and so ‘Some ogres are wicked’ is neither.