Leah and I took Ava to breakfast yesterday at the Hamburg Inn (Kim, I never see you there anymore!). It was yummy, as always. As I was paying la cuenta on the way out the door, I eavesdropped on a young man at a nearby table who was trying to explain to a non-native English speaker what catch-22 means. I gathered that the topic had come up in relation to the Heller novel. The fellow doing the explaining — bless him — was really butchering it, and I felt bad that his friend was going to leave that place with such bad information.<\/p>\n
I mentioned the exchange to Leah after we left, and she asked, “Well, how would you <\/em>explain it?” I replied that I’d probably start by framing the explanation with the concept of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Leah said, “Like being between a rock and a hard place.” I thought about it again this morning, and I thought to myself, “You know, my super-literate and smart readers would have some good ideas on this.” So, how would you most concisely explain what catch-22 means? Let’s go, people! Those comments ain’t going to write themselves!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Leah and I took Ava to breakfast yesterday at the Hamburg Inn (Kim, I never see you there anymore!). It was yummy, as always. As I was paying la cuenta on the way out the door, I eavesdropped on a young man at a nearby table who was trying to explain to a non-native English […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9oLlO-jy","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}