n a device or control that is very useful for a particular job
n the faculty of contriving; inventive skill
his skillful contrivance of answers to every problem
n an elaborate or deceitful scheme contrived to deceive or evade
his testimony was just a contrivance to throw us off the track
n an artificial or unnatural or obviously contrived arrangement of details or parts etc.
the plot contained too many improbable contrivances to be believable
The 100-day marker is a journalistic contrivance often used to evaluate new administrations.
Dulles, Eden argues, "strung Britain along over many months of negotiation from pretext to pretext, from device to device and from contrivance to contrivance.
Because Professor Allison's magneto-optical apparatus is his own contrivance, many a scientist doubted his discoveries.
Hilton Als: “Far from Heaven” and the problem musical. 8220;Far from Heaven” (at Playwrights Horizons) is a problem musical, a genteel contrivance wrapped in “issues”—racism, homophobia, misogyny—that limit the show, even as they are intended to expand, and then blow, our minds. There’s nothing sui generis about this latest . . . (Subscription required.)
June 17, 2013 - The New Yorker
Brian Mulroney in Canada.com Mulroney writes that Bouchard's resignation was a "complete contrivance. Not only was no principle involved, but he had ascribed his actions to noble motives, when the truth revealed the exact opposite."
Ralph Waldo Emerson in Middle East Online When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Manners: a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance," the wise men he probably had in mind were simply people in power, the fools being the rest of us: the powerless.
Henri Cartier-Bresson in The Advocate Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson said, "Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again."