>>27
And he heven't even done any clean-up.
http://paulgraham.com/arcfaq.html
Why did you keep car and cdr?
Because we couldn't think of any better alternatives. It would have been misleading to use first and rest or head and tail, because conses are fundamentally pairs; lists are one thing you can build with them, but not the only thing.
There's no conventional name in English for the first and second halves of a pair. If you have to make up names, car and cdr are pretty good choices, because they're short and the same length and naturally composable (e.g. cadr).