> rather than engage with my overall point

So you'd want someone to engage your overall point that there are redundant and deprecated functions, while the specific ones you actually have in mind are not redundant or deprecated (and you know this)? And for that reason, it would be good to keep the specifics out of the discussion? Okay ...

> There is nothing in the function name

Yes there is: the names get longer with increasing complexity of comparison.

The common eq prefix puts them into a family.

> avoiding (eql) unless you have specific need of it.

eql is the default value of the :test argument in numerous library functions.

Rather, you should avoid eq unless you're optimizing. Rarely do you want to compare objects in such a way that (<compare> 12345 12345) might be false!

It is idiomatic, though, to use eq in code that manipulates symbols, like (if (eq arg 'foo) ...).

If one of the arguments of an equality function is a constant, it's possible to pick the strongest equality function which goes with that constant's type. All equality functions reduce to eq when symbols are compared.

> Lisp seems to love doing this.

Many operator names in Lisp are short mnemonics. It is like this in older languages, or older parts of languages. Short identifiers keep programs short.

Short, mnemonic names are part of the elegance of traditional Lisps.

It's not just old versus new; for instance in some very new languages, we see a trend of shortening define to def, or function to fn and such.

My TXR Lisp is much newer than Common Lisp, but I shortened some things. Instead of stable-sort, I have ssort. Or instead of symbol-macrolet, I have symacrolet.
In Common Lisp, like in many languages, there is a "layer" of newer identifiers that are longer, often hyphenated compounds. You can tell that define-symbol-macro is newer than defun. However, someone making a new language which is inspired by an existing one can challenge those decisions, going by what identifiers are often used, rather than going by the chronological order in which they were introduced in the inspiring language. Symbol macros were introduced in Common Lisp for, I think, supporting with-slots. But symbol macros turn out to be important, deserving short names.

Why ssort rather than stable-sort? Part of the reason is that I made a change of introducing nsort as the in-place sort, making sort pure. That then establishes the idea that we have a one letter modifier. The s for stable becomes another one. And in fact, I have one more: c for caching. There are all eight combinations, in the order c, s, n: in other words c?s?n?sort. Thus csnort ("cee snort") is the caching, stable, destructive sort. I don't want to punish the programmer and reader of the code with caching-stable-destructive-sort. This is not Java.

You can't cram meaning into the spelling of every identifier, by making it out of a string of English words, because that makes things comically verbose.

Languages don't do that. You can't guess what "water" means, if you're new to English, and your native language doesn't have a cognate like "wasser". You just have to learn the vocabulary word. Some words are compounds of other words, others aren't. Only some compounds have compositional meanings, bearing out the obvious guess.