[Haskell-cafe] Splitting Hairs Over Terminology

[P. R. Stanley]

Hi folks
in C and C++ world the humble comma is an operator. Is this also the 
case in Haskell or, is it classed as a function?
In the wikibook they talk about consing new elements onto a list. 
Does this cons stand for anything meaningful in the English language? 
For example, is it short for construction or something similar?
I'm assuming that the ":" function takes two arguments and returns a 
newly constructed list which is assigned to the variable 
holding/pointing to the old list.

Cheers
Paul