Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice as long and three times as hard.
I really can get neither the concept of the bold parts nor the meaning of the latter part, especially the adjective hard.
Learn English – How to understand “twice as long and three times as hard”
adjectivesconjunctionsmeaning
Best Answer
It is a figurative way of speaking. The writer is expressing himself in a "funny" way. The purpose is to transmit an idea of how he felt about the name.
Even if the name was exactly twice as long as the original word they were thinking of, you can not really express precisely how much harder a name is compared to another.
So he basically is saying:
It is similar to what you would do when telling, for example, how was in the end the ice-cream someone had recommended you to eat:
It is also a matter of scale, it was twice (two times) bigger than expected. But 3 times harder (or tastier in the case of the ice-cream).
For instance if the name was something like:
You could probably say it was 5 times longer than you expected, but not really that much harder.