Double Trouble

Very unique!

Interesting

Wowza! That must have been a bear to construct. Well worth it - very fun solve. Tho it's sad how much difficulty I had counting to 2 in this grid, lol.

Well done, Mikey!

One of a kind!

Thanks, Mikey!

Answer: SINGULAR

Explanation: As hinted by ABC and XYZ, and the 26 columns, this puzzle has to do with the alphabet! Specifically, each column from left to right corresponds to a letter: the first column is the A column, the second is the B column, and so forth. If doubles are troubles, per the title, ignore all columns (there are 18 of them!) where the column's letter occurs twice. Eight of the columns have their letters occurring only once: A, G, I, L, N, R, S, and U. It's always less than ideal, but there was no way around it here: anagram these to form SINGULAR (the only common 8-letter word these letters rearrange to), the fitting answer to the meta.

12:10 puzzle, meta untimed.

very fun solve, i have such bad fomo on knowing how you geniuses do what you do, but that's a me problem. your comment about the size was the biggest hint, seeing how the columns lined up with the letters made it click (though i had initially dismissed the idea as i somehow counted only 20 columns at first... please let me know where i can return my combinatorics degree)

at least the crosshare puzzle was something i could reasonably tackle, moar of those plz... but don't stop with the metas!

Thank you for the huge smacking clue in the title! I spent about 30 seconds looking at the EE OO SS OO GG ... but that didn't go anywhere so I didn't waste much time on it.

Wow! In awe of (a) conceiving of the idea, and (b) executing it. Great aha! Too bad the difficulty of the WSJ and MGWCC might affect the number of folks who take a stab at this one.

Nice one! Thanks, Mikey.

Very unique, and a lot of fun to solve!

Geez. Hit me where I ain't why doncha.

Well, glad I was able to get it without a nudge. Took me three days but....

Was there any way to know the order of the letters?

I'm sure you'd preferred "hapax legomenon" if you could have made it work, but "singular" was quite apposite.

26 columns, starting with "abc" and ending with "xyz", weird fill, title...you played very fair here. Some great cluing exemplars of 76D. Really fun time

Very cool, glad I stuck with it! I am not great at this type of meta, finally stumbled on the right path when I noticed that there were at least two of each letter in the puzzle... and weird, the less common letters are both in the same column...

Went down some rabbit holes since Saturday but with the help of the first nudge (the alternate title), saw my way to the finish line...thanks Mikey!

Kudos!

That's a new meta for me....wow, nicely done.

Needed the nudges. I was partway there but just couldn't polish it off. Thanks for a cool puzzle.

Nice one, Mikey!

Struggled until I finally didn't. Needed the "It's original title was" nudge. Mad at myself because I pursued a double pangram idea early on but gave it up because there were two of everything, I did not think to look in the columns and of course with 26 columns I should have. Nicely done and no doubt difficult on the constructor! Loved the puns of course, particularly 39A...fennel I ever learn!