Add cognitive bias and placebo effects to that worldview, and as far as the medieval mind was concerned, it makes more sense to believe in magic then to doubt it, because sometimes it seemed to work. Magical thinking persists to this day for the same reason - it provides a false but shockingly self-sustaining model of reality.
If you're curious about this from a scholarly point of view, here[0] is a talk by Dr. Irving Finkel about ghost stories recorded in ancient Assyrian cuneiform, which touches on some of the magical practices involved, and I'd also recommend the Esoterica[1] channel which discusses the various kinds of magical philosophy by studying ancient magical texts. You can get a good idea of the way such people thought and how they saw the world from studying their writing.
You'd be surprised how much disaster a friggn tweet could lead to. If anything "word magic" has amplified with the Internet and communications technology.
It's only "magic" if you don't understand the mechanisms of how things work. And with hindsight, we can say this crap is "magic" because it doesn't work, but they weren't knowledgable enough to tell the difference.
I think what the parent is talking about is words that have an effect on something that isn't mediated by the responses of people who heard them. It's very easy to understand why a friggn tweet has an effect, because there's a clear mechanism behind how it causes that effect. Likewise the power of a witch-doctor is entirely based on how people respond to what they say and do. In contrast, it is extremely hard to rationalise any effect that is caused by "magical" words spoken to a mountain or a tree, because there isn't any part of that mountain or tree that understands the words, or has an ability to act on them.
In a medieval setting, commoners visiting a court might believe courtiers dressed in fancy clothes and speaking in Latin were doing magic and performing spells. They might have no idea how things like law and government works. If those kinds of magic worked, why wouldn't magic on mountains or trees work? Especially if you were taught by wise people from the church that invisible spirits definitely existed.
The Golden Bough (a book written by a turn-of-the-century anthropologist) considers questions like this[1]. The third chapter of the first volume discusses the principles of "sympathetic" magic being based in the concepts of similarity and contagion. One thinks immediately of voodoo dolls and garlic. It is perhaps surprising that there is a kind of logic at work here!
Sorry i made fun. Really though what is this comment but a spell(ing)? I cast my spelling and expect an effect wether my reasoning is valid or not. Methods that seem to have a compelling causal loop at play get distilled into divinity practices such as "tarot" or "tweeting" each themselves requiring a larger semantic web to make sense of.
Way back in the day, a religious leader was described as a man of the cloth, which sounds eerily similar to todays CTOs leading their monasteries of illuminaries to build out "service fabric". Solomons temple had two columns, both draped with networking.
Just as with hn comments, one can dismiss it all, or one can approach it with suspension of disbelief.
What is the logical causal chain that compels professional sports players to do their "lucky wiggle" before a serve?