It's a shortcut because it's an alternative (and faster) way to access a functionality. There's no other way to get the letter C than to press the C key on your keyboard, therefore it's not a shortcut. Saying that using the function key to access the arrow key is indeed not a shortcut, chord or combo would be more appropriate, but your "Ctrl + C" example was a bad one to take.

What other way is there to access "copy" (Ctrl-C)? I feel like this stems from the belief that the keyboard is secondary to the mouse. So the official way is to right click and select copy from the menu? When was the last time you actually saw someone do that?

You could go the other way and say all the letters on your keyboard are shortcuts for entering the characters specific to your language. After all, there are far more characters in unicode for all the languages in the world and there is no shortcut for those. In Emacs I could do absolutely everything via M-x commands, even typing: e.g. M-x "insert-char" "LATIN SMALL LETTER J".

OK, this is becoming a bit silly. My main point really was that by adopting a keyboard-driven workflow you no longer think of the keyboard as "shortcuts", it just becomes the way to do it and, yeah, I definitely think Ctrl-C counts as that.

Take a new software, like Blender or Gimp, and you'll totally have to do things "manually" via the menus before memorizing the "shortcuts" that will boost your productivity. It's nice for discoverability, accessibility, and probably necessary for most people (including me). I really don't see what's wrong in calling these shortcuts, if there's a longer, manual, tedious version, which has a shorter alternative. If you're a keyboard-driven person, I can get the idea, but you are being pedantic IMO...

Nobody has ever called me pedantic ;)

I get what you mean and I can see why they are referred to as "shortcuts". I just think it's a deficiency in UI design that leads to such a term. I have used software like Inkscape a lot and using it efficiently is a bit like playing guitar: one hand on the mouse, the other on the keyboard, working together. Discoverability is good (although I think massively overhyped) but a good UI should lead you to discover the most efficient way to do something, not the least efficient.