Hombre-to-be perhaps / MON 10-26-20 / Yellow flowers in primrose family / 1980s gaming console in brief / Title woman in song by Beatles Spinners / Health professional who has your back

Constructor: Eric Bornstein

Relative difficulty: Medium (2:59)

THEME:"GET CRACKING!" (62A: Apt command to an 18-, 28- or 47-Across) — all the themers are occupations in which cracking (in one form or another) is involved:

Theme answers:

• CODEBREAKER cracks codes (18A: One reading secret messages)
• STAND-UP COMIC cracks jokes (28A: Professional joke teller)
• CHIROPRACTOR cracks spines (47A: Health professional who has your back?)

Word of the Day: MUCHACHO (39D: Hombre-to-be, perhaps) —

1chiefly Southwest : a male servant

2chiefly Southwest : a young man (merriam-webster.com) (in Spanish, it's just a word for "boy")

If corny puns are your thing, then this puzzle works just fine. It's consistent, and the revealer has a certain spark, so ... yeah, there you go. It holds up. I have no complaints about the theme except that I continue to resent when "?" clues are used on themers when the theme itself is not "?"-clue dependent (see 47A: Health professional who has your back?). If your theme wackiness necessitates "?" clues all around, then by all means, go to town. But a randomly thrown-in "?" clue in a puzzle that doesn't specifically call for them, that's just confusing to me. Inelegant. Get your cleverness on somewhere else. Save it for the non-theme fill. Also, is there a difference between a STAND-UP COMIC and a stand-up comedian (the term I hear much more frequently)? Not faulting the answer, as it's certainly in-the-language, just wondering if there's even a subtle difference between the two. My initial inquiries indicate not. Maybe people just want to save two syllables because their time is valuable? I think I prefer "comedian" because it's a word with only one valence (whereas a "comic" can be a form of graphic storytelling). Actually I probably prefer it for totally unconscious reasons that have more to do with habit and experience. I think the first themer is a teensy-weensy bit of an outlier, in the sense that it's got a synonym for "cracking" built in ("breaker" meaning, essentially, "cracker"). But that's an issue that's too teensy-weensy to care too much about.