The expression “catch 22” comes from a novel that was written by an American author Heller, and this is novel about World War 2. American participation in the second World War back in 1940 and the expression is somewhat difficult to understand but you will sometimes see this, someone might say “that’s a catch 22 or he is in a catch 22 situation”, the expression means this, the best way to explain this is by giving an example, let’s say that you will want to learn a new language, we call this language X and the only way to learn this language is to go to the country where they speak language X and that is what we call the X land. well, you go and you try to get a visa to go to the country of X land and they say “ well, you can come to our country but you have to be able to speak our language—language X”.
this is what we call “ catch 22”, in order to learn language X you have to study in X land but in order to go to X land you have to already know language X, because you can’t get the visa. So what it is the contradiction you have two situations that prevent each other from ever taking place. That is called the “catch 22”.
