As names, car and cdr are great: short, and just the right visual distance apart. The only argument against them is that they're not mnemonic. But this is a weak argument.
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Is it necessarily true that you can't use Lisp for more than a week without being aware of how it's implemented? And if yes, is this a good thing? The fact that Lisp has cons cells as a basic data type seems like exactly the sort of implementation detail which shouldn't matter.
It sounds like you may be conflating conses and lists. If conses were only used for lists, then it would be an implementation detail that they were made of pairs. But conses aren't only used for lists.
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I'm not sure if my meaning was clear. Is there a reason that people need to know how lists are implemented, or could a Lisp user plausibly think that lists are first-class data structures? If someone might not realize how lists are implemented, the names c[ad]r won't mean much.
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I agree that cons cells can be used for things other than creating lists; but the fact that lists are necessarily built out of cons cells seems like an implementation detail. (And potentially one to avoid, e.g. for improved performance with handling large lists.)
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