It's not true in general that public-key encryption and digital signatures are inverse operations. (RSA has that property, but there are plenty of other algorit

It's not true in general that public-key encryption and digital signatures are inverse operations. (RSA has that property, but there are plenty of other algorithms that don't work that way.) If you're writing for a lay audience that doesn't care about things like modular arithmetic, there's no reason to conflate the two operations. Just say encryption is like keys and locks, and signing is like... well... a signature.