11D: The etymology of this French word for a nickname — SOBRIQUET — is chummy and sweet; it means something like “a chuck under the chin,” which stuck with me when I learned it awhile ago. Presumably this gesture is done with affection.

38D: This one stopped me in my tracks because I assumed it had to be “IT guy,” which has been in the puzzle plenty of times and sounds increasingly dated, since there are so many women coding people into space or telling them calmly to unplug their device and plug it back in, which honestly works at least half the time. Fortunately, the enlightened Mr. means IT PRO, which debuted last month and will presumably become the norm.

53D: I’d heard of people muffing their lines in a play, but hadn’t ever seen FLUFF used this way, as an error. This entry was once clued as “Boo-boo,” though, so it has a history.

Today’s Theme

The name of the puzzle strongly suggested “Constant Comment” to me, and I assume it’s a play on the Bigelow tea flavor with that name; I couldn’t find any alternative products using that slogan, anyway. Tea has absolutely nothing to do with the theme today, in case you were wondering, but I couldn’t shake that little earworm — was there a commercial for this tea in the 1970s or something that I’m thinking of? I couldn’t find it.

There are five theme entries, each composed of two parts. One entry is too big to fit on a line and takes two mirroring places at 22- and 105-Across; the others are at 35-, 51-, 75- and 86-Across. They all have pun clues, which were very fun to me after the fact, but the entries were too hard for me to use the clues to figure out, if that makes sense. I needed every cross I could wrangle, and, when I had figured out the ruse, I was able to use one part to get the other part. So Mr. Nediger’s great sense of humor was wasted on me as an active solver and much appreciated by me as a slightly disheveled finished solver.