[qqueue]

See "Why King George III Can Encrypt" (2014) for an alternative metaphor to 'private key' and 'public key':

http://randomwalker.info/teaching/spring-2014-privacy-techno...

>We present the user with four items, a key, lock, seal and imprint. The key and lock serve the purposes of encryption: Alice distributes her locks as widely as possible so that others can send her messages that only she can open with her key. Similarly, the seal and imprint handle signing: Alice passes out copies of her imprint so others can verify her as the sender of messages she has stamped with her seal. Collected together, we refer to these four items as a toolkit this abstraction handles the contingency where a user loses her key but not her seal: we insist that the toolkit represents an indivisible unit that must be replaced whenever any element is lost.

[Freak_NL]

That is actually a really nice metaphor they came up with. The seal and imprint are pretty useful for explaining signed email.

I already explain encrypted email to colleagues with the key and lock metaphor: I give you a box full of open padlocks to which only I hold the key, and you do the same for me. Anyone can have the padlocks as long as you keep the key secure. Seems to work.