I'm referring to what you commonly use, but also I'm talking about the part of the standard library that involves more basic operations like creating collection

I'm referring to what you commonly use, but also I'm talking about the part of the standard library that involves more basic operations like creating collections, iterating them, defining and requiring modules, creating objects, looping, destructuring, literals, conditionals, data types, polymorphism, error handling, etc. As opposed to say learning the standard library relating to MIDI access, or file IO, or other specialized things that in theory could be a library and aren't really core. It might sound a little like syntax, but because Lisps have such a lean syntax, there's a lot of the fundamental constructs that are part of the standard library and they are more what I'm referring too. For example you'll have things like: car, cdr, append, mapcar, some, every, symbols, keywords, loop, intern, quote, format, butlast, intersection, union, multiple-value-bind, apply, funcall, =, eq, eql, if, unless, typecase, cond, dolist, iterate, etc. What often happens in Lisps is that each core function is very powerful and becomes almost a mini-DSL. So it takes a while to really learn about all those and have them memorized by heart so you don't constantly need to refer to the documentation about what they do and how they work and how to use them. And often their power comes when they are combined together as well, and that also takes some time to learn all the valid ways of combining them. Before you are familiar with all that and it's second nature, almost instinctive, you'll be a lot slower to read and write code.