Words similar to contrivances

Example sentences for: contrivances

How can you use “contrivances” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:

In describing mechanical contrivances, the Germans continue to use their word Wagen to mean car, as in Volkswagen ; and American English has the compound station wagon , originally a horse vehicle for fetching people at train stations.
The other story is the love affair between a luckless torch singer (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and a luckless ex-fisherman (David Strathairn), in which the two--through a series of melodramatic contrivances that testify to Sayles' lack of ingenuity as a storyteller--end up together with the singer's brilliant, desperately unhappy daughter (Vanessa Martinez) on a remote island, where they're prey to cold, starvation, and drug smugglers with shotguns.
But most of the elements didn't come out of The Golden Bough . They came out of all the other successful pseudo-mythical contrivances of American popular culture--Westerns, Flash Gordon , The Godfather , and so on.
James Caan begins hilariously as Gina's hearty, lunkish father, but then has to get all noble under the weight of the picture's dumb, melodramatic contrivances.