The casual reader's potential to grasp the story of The Urth Cycle is reduced further by Wolfe's deployment of esoteric nouns. However, the inclusion of obscure diction is not solely a method for obfuscating the narrative's subtext. Rather, its introduction establishes a shifting kaleido-scope of adumbration and revelation which confronts the reader with the problem of determining when Wolfe's vocabulary serves to reveal and develop the pentalogy's themes and when it functions deflectively.

In The Castle of the Otter, Wolfe admits that he has no fondness for ‘gibberish’ (by which he means neologisms), and his use of archaisms is, fundamentally, an expression of his own aesthetic preferences. He explains that he has ‘used odd words to convey the flavour of an odd place at an odd time’, and these ‘odd words’ are, therefore, substitutes for SF's more usual neologistic invention. Nevertheless, somewhat ironically, Wolfe's archaisms function as neologisms, acting as agents of estrangement to render the fictional Urth alien; they may be as much ‘gibberish’, or nonsense, to the reader, as invented language.

More importantly, in his interview with Larry McCaffery for Science-Fiction Studies, Wolfe suggests that the historical nomenclature of Urth provides a sense of continuity with Earth, a sensation of ‘where you've been and how far you've travelled …’. He also acknowledges that ‘a great deal of knowledge can be intuited if you know something about the words people use’, self-consciously hinting at his indirect disclosure of information through the allusive qualities of his language.

Paradoxically, Wolfe's Classico-medieval references function both deflectively and candidly on this intuitive, allusionary level. While they imply that Urth is an ahistorical fantasy world, they also ensure that the Commonwealth resounds with an archaic quality that is appreciable by the reader (indeed the ‘Ur-’ prefix, which alludes to the primitive, or the earliest, implies a direct association with the past).

Equally, Wolfe's replacement of neologistic experimentation with archaic reappropriations conveys the notion of recycling, of social, linguistic and creative exhaustion. As Severian observes, the stagnation of the Commonwealth, which is manifest in its language, arises in part ‘[b]ecause the prehistoric cultures endured for so long, [so that] they have shaped our heritage in such a way as to cause us to behave as if their conditions still applied’ (Citadel, p. 217).