According to some contemporary philosophers, call them easy realists, traditional ontological question, such as those concerning the existence of objects, properties, events, numbers, (etc.) can be fully resolved, in favor of realism, by inquiring into the semantics of ordinary language. Easy realism builds on the assumption that ordinary talk of the aforementioned kinds of entities is guaranteed to be true because it directly reflects the meaning of the involved expressions. In this paper, I provide an argument against this claim. By pointing to changes in speech-patterns across counterfactual situations where speakers’ beliefs vary, I argue that that ordinary talk of the relevant entities do not reflect facts about meaning, but rather widespread metaphysical beliefs. As a result, contra easy realism, inquiry into the semantics of ordinary language does not suffice to show that such talk is true. My focus is mostly on Amie Thomasson’s version of the easy realism (see e.g., her Ontology made easy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) but I also briefly discuss how the argument might generalize to the wider easy-realist school.