Visiting England recently, I was told by my friend, the father of a 15-year-old, that "That's long!" is the newest way of complaining about something. It means, apparently, "That's really annoying!" or "That's bad news!" but, before you ask, "short" doesn't mean "great" - it just means, um, "short".
Communities of children and teenagers, like any other subcultural group, love to define and reinforce their collective identity by using the language that they share with the "mainstream" culture in new and distinctive ways. We are all doubtless familiar with the inverted meaning that black American English gave to the word "Bad!" - meaning "Great!" - and in the middle section of Zadie Smith's novel "White Teeth" she introduces us to an esoteric variety of North London slang used by her 9-year-old protagonists in which, for example, "chief" is a terrible insult.
Knowing the meaning of a word in one context does not guarantee that we will understand it in another, and logic is not necessarily a useful key to understanding slang or jargon, which often exist with the intention of confusing the excluded mainstream (think about the origins of "Cockney Rhyming Slang” as a language in which the London criminal classes could converse without being understood by the police).
However, maybe if we investigate the strange and versatile word "long" we can find two clues to this new meaning: on the one hand, there is the associated idea of "a long time", which could easily be synonymous with feelings of boredom or frustration. On the other, maybe more tenuously, there is the verb "to long (for something or to do something)" which is also connected to frustration and dissatisfaction.
"Long", as an adverb, generally has nothing to do with physical measurement of size or distance: it means "a long time" or "for a long time", and "How long...?" usually means "For what period of time...?"
"I stopped gambling long before I met you"; "Long ago there lived a king..."
When not followed by ...after.., ...before..., or ...ago, the adverb "long", like much, has the peculiarity of being used only in questions or negative sentences
"Have you been waiting long?" ; "I haven't been waiting long.";
I've been waiting for a long time.
although this rule doesn't apply when we use the comparative form:
"I've been waiting longer than him"
"As long as" means "for whichever amount of time / for the same amount of time..." in sentences like
"You can stay here as long as you like"
and by extension becomes a way of stating a condition:
"You can stay here, as long as you don't make too much noise"
No longer or any longer are expressions (meaning "for no (any) more time") that we use to talk about the end of a situation:
"I no longer speak to my ex-wife"; "I can't tolerate this treatment a moment longer!"
A longing is a strong, difficult-to-satisfy desire for something, a desire that makes us rather melancholy or frustrated; and the associated verb is to long.
"I long to see my homeland again"; "Lara longed for an end to this terrible war"
Shakespeare enjoyed playing games with words that have double meanings, and we can find both of these uses of long - the adverb and the verb - in a single line from Hamlet. Ophelia tells Hamlet that she has various love-tokens, given to her by Hamlet, that she has wanted to give back to him for a long time:
"My lord, I have remembrances of yours, That I have longed long to re-deliver."
Hamlet replies, irritated, that he has never given Ophelia anything. Perhaps a modern-day Hamlet would just reply: "Oh Ophelia, that's just so long..!"
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