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:

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.
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.
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.
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.