It turns out keyword access also works for symbols;
user> ('x '{x 2})
2
I didn’t know that years back and ended up with a subtle bug since I almost never do this.
Fyi, using the map-as-function form ({:x 2} :x) has the side benefit of being typically faster than going through the polymorphic clojure.core/get (and surprisingly faster than the keyword access route without much change), since get works on java maps and sets and arrays. All the polymorphism adds overhead per access.