Re: Easy to miss something trivial
With a typewriter, it's obvious what SHIFT means -- it literally and quite visibly shifts the whole guts of the machine, with an audible "clunk". It's obvious that pressing SHIFT puts the machine into a different state and releasing returns it to its original state -- and so, if you want a capital letter, it's clear what the order of key presses and releases has to be.
If you're too young to remember typewriters, I presume that the essential "shift"ness of the operation isn't nearly as viscerally obvious -- to the point that the key's name has become detached from any obvious referent.
In other words, a typewriter provides feedback, but a computer doesn't. Haptic too, in the case of a mechanical typewriter -- without a power assist, you have to press that SHIFT key *hard*.
And what's CTRL, anyway? It's another shift, but to a different chunk of the ASCII (or Latin-n or Unicode) character set than SHIFT shifts to. But non-geek users don't -- and shouldn't be expected to -- know that. To them, CTRL (like ALT) means: "do something magic[1], with rarely any direct mapping to what the other key has on its keycap, so you just have to memorize it".
[1] in the Clarkeian sense
Biting the hand that feeds IT
