It's more subtle than that, though. Every list has a beginning; not all lists have ends. If the 'car' semantics are "last item of the list" this is actually meaningfully different from "first item of the reversed list".

It's not meaningful at all. The list would just be constructed entirely from right to left. The "first" item in a pair would be on the right, and "car" would just mean "item on the right of a pair", or "first item in a list".

Are you also writing right-to-left, then? If everything about the system is reflected (including having a reading order of right-to-left), then you're right, it's not meaningful. But it's also not what's proposed in the OP here. When the two-dimensional text on the screen is re-formed into a linear string, it is the right end of line N that is attached to the left end of line N+1, and so the right-hand arguments of functions are "after" the left-hand arguments.