I love that interpretation of the name, I'll have to remember it. My sole introduction to LISP was also in school. I took a survey of programming languages class where we were to learn 5 languages and produce at least one project in each. It turned out to be 6 in reality because the last project was to write a LISP interpreter in SNOBOL! Have you ever heard of SNOBOL? It is one of the most infuriating "teaching languages" I have every seen. It is the only one I know of where a space can be:
1) addition,
2) concatenation,
3) pattern matching,
4) set combiniation, and
5) white noise
and all in the SAME statement!
It is an interpreted language that can be extended on the fly. My LISP interpreter actually translated the LISP code into SNOBOL code and ran it that way. It was really facinating to debug my 400 line program when the error messages read, "Error in line 617..."
I don't know how or why I survived that class, but ever since, my programs have had the bad habbit of sprouting parenthesis all over the place. ;-( (See what I mean?)