The Stone Lottery

Question One


A lottery is defined as "a contest in which tokens are distributed or sold, the winning token or tokens being secretly predetermined or ultimately selected in a random drawing" by this dictionary website. When I personally think of a lottery I think of the scratch-off cards that people (who are over 18--so not me) are always buying in front of me at gas stations, taking forever, when I'm in a huge hurry and all I really honestly need is to hand over my ten to fill up my tank. Anyway, a lottery is most often a word with a good connotation because it means that an individual has won major money, or something along those lines. Naturally, by looking at the title of this short story, I assumed the story will be about an individual winning money and the effects of this. The society in which I have matured has never used the word 'lottery' to regard anything negative, such as stoning an individual. I was really taken aback by the events that occurred in the last page; I could pretty soon into the story that something was a little off about this lottery, and my original presumption was wrong. However, I was stunned to read "but they still remembered how to use the stones," and then, a few sentences later read "a stone hit her on the side of the head." The story's title is definitely a misnomer in the sense of today's world.