M. Hogan

@Michael That's how I've always heard it, too, and I'm American. And I would pronounce "milieu" mill-yuh, not mill-you. No wonder I couldn't work the theme out!

@Darian Nits are head lice. A madrasa is an Islamic school. A nob is an old-fashioned word for a head. An asana is any kind of yoga pose. I might have got those, but I'm still trying to understand "sadd", so if you can explain that to me, I'll be grateful!

@Andrzej The puzzle works fine on any device. You're not supposed to actually press the shift key, just to be delighted by this clever way of representing short answers as long ones. (I did it on my phone, too, and couldn't remember what the top bar of the keyboard I touch-type so happily on looks like, either. I didn't have to remember to solve the puzzle.)

@Andrzej Lots of things make solving a puzzle easier, Andrzej, including Googling the answers. That doesn't mean that the themes work less well when one is using paper and pencil. And you didn't say the theme worked "worse" on phones; you said it really only worked on some devices and that made it a poor idea. I can't agree--I thought it was a delightful puzzle with a very clever idea.

@Barry Ancona And something that is incorrect is misleading. I wasn't complaining about the puzzle or it's creator, just that comment on the clues in the column

@Andrzej That's fine--you don't have to care, and you certainly don't have to be delighted. But equally, I have a right to comment when someone else's post strikes me as both illogical and unfair. The people who put these puzzles together put a LOT of work into them. Saying that their whole idea was bad just because you couldn't easily find the answer by looking at your keyboard seemed both ridiculous and unfair, so in fairness to the creator, I felt a need to point that out. (It's not as if we had to press the shift key to get the answer. Nothing changes if we do.)

@Mark Misleading because anyone reading his column for help with the clues would think all four theme clues had to be numbers.

@M. Hogan Please emend that "it's" to "its".

@Andrzej I'm not refusing to see the problem, Andrzej. I understand that it would have been easier to solve the theme clues if we'd using our computers instead of our phones. (And it was still easier on the phone than it would have been if we'd been sitting in a subway car or somewhere else out of phone reach with the folded paper, and no way to check what the top bar of a keyboard looks like.) But the puzzle was still solvable, and there wasn't any special effect that we missed out on, so I really don't understand what makes you think this puzzle shouldn't even have been created.