Do you know CATCH-22?
In Craig David‘s album The Story Goes has a song, called Johnny. It’s talking about the story of a boy got punch near school; however, he could not do anything such as escape or protect himself, instead of feeling every blow. He’s afraid to tell others that will make things worse, even though he has tried to speak out his story but no one listened, so the hitting repeat again and again. What a pity!
It has such a word in its lyric (photo above) – catch-22. Do you know the meaning of that? It’s a slang from Joseph Heller’s famous literature Catch-22 (《第二十二条军规》). Now I am reading his book CATCH AS CATCH CAN (中文的，《得过且过》，浙江文艺出版社), so I understand it as it happens. I’m trying my best to understand the black humor of this great writer; unfortunately, there’s no consciousness till now.
Return to the word catch-22, it has been collected by many English Dictionary. Now, I show two quotes of them:
- OXFORD ADVANTAGED LEARNER’S ENGLISH-CHINESE DICTIONARY – catch-22: (slang) dilemma faced by sb who is bound to suffer, whichever course of action he takes 进退维谷
- 金山词霸2002 – AMERICAN TRADITIONAL DICTIONARY – catch-22: A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions: 不可逾越的障碍；第22条军规由于一套本身不合逻辑的规则或条件而不可能获得期望的结果或解决方式的情形
When I heard the music for the first time I could not clearly understand what he was singing, because Craig David sang: caught ina catch 22 but he’d still rather be at home. In and A was sung together [i-nʌ], oh~~~ Liaison made me crazy all the time, no matter in English or in Spanish, of course, it’s more terrible in the later. If you don’t know what the meaning of catch-22 is, how you could believe there really is such word in there.
After this essay, hope you could understand it better just as which I did a few days ago.
