Colloquial Philosophy

 In the essay "The Law of Mind", C.S. Pierce gives a couple of examples of "hypothetic inference", or "an induction from qualities". The first describes how he might tell that a chance stranger met on a train is a "mugwump". The term "mugwump" has as far as I know been obsolete for a century and more. In the late 19th Century, it meant someone who thought himself above party politics. One conjecture traces it back to an Algonquin word or expression meaning something like "a great man". A jocular etymology spoke of a bird with its mug on one side of a fence and its rump on the other. I doubt that the term appears in Santayana's explicitly philosophical work, or in William James's.

In the essay that preceded "The Law of Mind", "The Architecture of Theories", Pierce wrote of John Stuart Mill giving a "socdolager" to some theory. This term I remember seeing in print once before, where it appeared to mean something like "a great product". The OED gives it as originally meaning a knock-out blow. It is American, and the OED could offer early references but could not suggest its derivation.

I suppose that many works of philosophy must include similarly colloquial usages. Unfortunately, I know no language other than English (American English) well enough to detect them. Some, if one goes far enough back, must be lost to history for want of contemporary comments.