I can get behind car/cdr -> first/rest.

I could get behind renaming the modes, but I’m not sure how to rename them. I would be hesitant to name them after notes or using numbers, since that would be confusing. As it is, I can say “C dorian scale” and that’s a pretty concise and unambiguous name for a series of notes. Maybe I could say “C minor, natural sixth scale”. It’s a bit verbose and modes are fairly rare. It’s also a bit weird—would I then say “A dorian scale” as “A minor, sharp sixth scale”? Already I’m a bit confused by this terminology. Maybe “A minor, major sixth scale”? The “major minor” is a bit weird.

The trick with advancing expressiveness and meaningfulness is that 1) you are going to have to memorize new meanings even if the words are familiar and 2) if it’s not usable by experts, it won’t be adopted by experts and you’ll end up with at worst, multiple incompatible sets of terminology.

Face it—I’m going to have to do a fair bit of memorization to learn music theory. It is unavoidable with music theory as it is with other subjects. So I might as well pick nice, short words like “scale” which make some intuitive sense, rather than pick “ordered basis” which is a total mouthful. After all, I will only spend a short amount of time memorizing terms, and a much, MUCH longer time using them.