As a kid, I always thought the “coding language” of magic in these books was clever. If you know the secret magical name of something, then you can speak to it in the secret magical language, and it will obey you. This had built-in scaling limits, for example, if you wanted to conjure a tidal wave, then you would need to know the names of millions of droplets of water, which naturally means a tidal wave spell is going to be very long winded and difficult to cast.