No worries, didn't feel demeaned but wanted to be clear that it was an attempt to try to ignore ~23 years of ssh muscle memory to try to guess what might trip up a new Linux user

Very much true in my case - I couldn't explain what the, like.. "idiomatic" meaning of those brackets is, I only guess from context and experience, and it remains a minor peeve of mine that such symbology is widely used but rarely explained