"splice" makes perfect sense when you're extracting middle elements from an array and thus splicing together the leading and trailing elements.

It makes, um, a little less sense when you're using it just to remove elements from the head or tail (to be clear, I'm speaking only of the command's name, not of its appropriateness for the task.)

Though you could argue, say, that you're splicing together array position 0 and the middle of the array when you're removing elements from the head...