Make Your Mark

Hot as a jalapeño

ôütçtàndïñg!

Answer: TOUCHÉ

Explanation: Seven symmetric entries are words or proper nouns spelled with a diacritical mark: PINATA (tilde on the "N"), NAIVE (diaeresis on the "I"), SOUPCONS (cedilla on the "C"), SAUTE (accent on the "E"), LHOPITAL (circumflex on the "O"), SENOR (tilde on the "N"), BRONTE (diaeresis on the "E"). These letters spell out NICE ONE, a great phrase and exhortation to you for finding it - but it's neither six letters nor a single word!

The 5 of 7 clue x 2 initially got me to nonce which is unique and seemed like a stretch. The real answer was way cooler. Great puzzle, Mikey.

My daughter got it instantly! Thanks Mikey

Nice one! :D

I knew there had to be more! I got the NICE ONE and tried touche (because of its mark) based on that. Half-surprised myself that it took! Totally missed the TWO SHAY hint/confirmation! Nice work, Mikey. I say give that guy a jalapeno souffle!

Your "level 4" suggestion told me I didn't have a chance. But I did!

Nice one indeed! But I tried to make it even harder by NAIVEly assUme-ing six theme entries were enough. When I couldn't make a word out of NCEONE I tried to make another diacritic by playing connect-the-dots in the grid.

Nice one!

Very thankful for the nudges!

Finally!!! Sooooo many synonyms for NICE ONE, but never did think to look in the clues. Thank goodness for Nudge 10. Thanks for the puzzle, Mikey!

Got way too hung up on thinking of marks as grades, eventually figured it out! I figured something was up with the clue for TWO, but it took a while to make the final connection. Thanks Mikey!

On a side note, it's strange how the clues for TAPIA and APSIS when taken out of their respective words both give you RL. It was so strange I thought it had to mean something lol

Embarrassed that I needed that last nudge to find the final touch(é), especially given how long I'd spent staring at that SHAY/AYS crossing, and wondering why you wouldn't have gone with SHAD/ADS instead. I also spent a huge amount of time on Mechapuzzle -- did you realize this puzzle has a shockingly low count of the letter E? That and a few other oddities kept me entertained for quite a while.

Wow! That was difficult and clever! Finally got it after the last nudge. Great puzzle!

Got it without nudges, but not the way I should have. I got the nice one. and of course entered it because I did not read the prompt, to find I was WRONG - WHAT???? So I went back and looked and it said 6 but I had 7...huh. Plus I did not have the grid correctly filled, I put in AYE for Shakespearian assent. I'm guessing from looking at the Crosshare solve that it was missing an S so that it would be AYS, I also had 56A wrong because we had been talking Baseball all puzzle so I had NLE (figuring, well some colloquialisms might have SLEGH as SLAY) so I was never going to have it right. When I went back to put in the actual names of the diacritical marks I got TUCA and my mind said TUC A or TOUCHE and I know that has a diacritical and I know that in fencing they say that when they have hit their mark so....

By the way, you could have avoided the math clue for 45A simply by saying "Where you go if you are ill on the Ile-de-Cite or Sick in Strasbourg" because l'Hôpital is "the hospital" no matter which. That actually confused me a bit because it introduced another mark, an apostrophe, which initially gave me 8 letters but I dropped it because I saw you needed one per entry. At any rate I'll stop now because I don't want to die a critical person!

At any rate the REAL mechanism is way cool and kind of a pageant pageant, or Schrodinger's answer, in that it is wrong and right at the same time.

I got all the way to NICE ONE without any nudges. I needed nudge 10, or was it 28, to get to the real answer. I was trying to do something related to https://maps.app.goo.gl/dmwpA5pfbrDXTpEJA , but it doesn't have any diacritical marks.

1st idea: all the exclamation points! Except there are way more than 6… 2nd idea: okay it’s diacritical marks. (And I was missing lhopital and had itsastart instead, adding an apostrophe before the S, so using the S I had NICENS… isn’t that a word?) 3rd idea: okay use the nudges… NICE ONE. Une? That’s “one”in NIce…. 4th idea: one is SHOO, or STOP. A shoe’s top. TONGUE?? 5th idea: use ALL the nudges, and the last one is about clues. Reread all the clues. There they are! (I remembered that 9A seemed like a contrived clue, and had even circled it at one point). This was quite a treasure hunt, Mikey! “Une!” (That’s a Nice “one”)

coming in at the wire...got all the way to Nice One after nudge 5, but needed nudge 10 to remind me to go back to the clues...Bravo, Mikey!

As I say laying down my épée ( a sword with two diacritical marks, btw), Foiled again.

Finally came back to this. Had all the info on my own but needed that last nudge. Cute!