[Haskell-cafe] Splitting Hairs Over Terminology

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