39D: “Hits back?” sounds as if it hints at someone who is engaging in self-defense, but it really should be read as “Hits the back of …” The answer is REAR ENDS.

57D: “A lot of pizazz?” sounds as if it refers to something that is particularly zippy, but what we are really looking for is the letter that makes up a lot of the word “pizazz.” That would be the three ZEES in the word.

Today’s Theme

We’ve all seen them in the puzzle: E-book, e-reader, e-sign … anything that was schlepped online seemed to get an “E” put in front of it at some point to denote that it was the electronic version of an item. In real life, we have become so used to some of these things being online that the “E” is no longer necessary. A book is a book, whether you read it on your Kindle or Nook or you read the dead tree version.

But this oddity in our lexicon seems to have stuck with Mr. Donaldson, and he offers us a whole puzzle about it. The answers are not immediately intuitive. The prefix “E” in the clue at 18A is “E-book?” and the answer — out of all the books that have ever been published — is “THE SECRET.” The reason the answer is “THE SECRET” is because that title uses only the vowel “E,” making it an “E-book.”

O. K., then. Our job is to figure out what phrases using “E” as the only vowel could be the answer to Mr. Donaldson’s clues. It took me a while to make the connection — I wasn’t sure what a TERM SHEET was at 27A (it turns out to be a “terms and conditions” notice) — and some of the entries seemed random to me, but they do stick to the “the only vowel in the theme entries is the letter ‘E’” rule.

And not all of them are literal. To “E-sign” something is to put your electronic signature on it, yet the answer is ENTER HERE. That could be a button you click online to gain access to a website, but I’ve never heard it called an “E-sign.”



Mr. Donaldson did pack a lot of theme material in his grid. Seven “E” festooned theme entries cross the grid, and three of them are debuts.

Constructor Notes

Let me be terse, Deb. Seven theme entries? Eek! Seems the denser the theme, the less we expect cleverness. Yes, three-letter terms teem here, yet these gems help present sweetness elsewhere. See, e.g., the excellent EMCEED, MERE, CRED, et ZEES. (Regrets re: the French end — felt seemly there.)

The Tipping Point

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