I am passing in command line arguments to my Lisp program and they are formatted like this when they hit my main function: ("1 1 1" "dot" "2 2 2")

I have a dot function and would like to call it directly from the argument, but this isn't possible because something like (funcall (second args)...) receives "dot" and not dot as the function name.

I tried variations of this function:
(defun remove-quotes (s)
(setf (aref s 0) '""))

to no avail, before realizing that the quotes were not really a part of the string. Is there a simple way to do this, or should I just check each string and then call the appropriate function?

Thanks!