Sentence examples for a mere device from inspiring English sources

The dream is "a MacGuffin" (a mere device to trigger the plot).

Mr. Redmayne, who last month won the Olivier Award (the British version of the Tony) for his performance, keeps his character from ever seeming like a mere device.

If you believe that competitive advantage is wrapped up in human capital, then the change in America's people will surely affect its future far more than a mere device such as the Internet.On the other hand, it is possible to exaggerate just how quickly the melting pot is cooking this stew.

I loved the heated, overflowing talk in "Crash," most of which is wonderfully written, and I wasn't bothered by the movie's pileup of coincidences: "Crash" was a Los Angeles fable about twisted-metal automotive connection in a disconnected place — coincidence was not a mere device but what the movie was about.

Defined by his creator as "a mere device . . . a whispering 'daemon,' " Marlow is more specifically a vehicle for exploring the perspectival nature of human affairs — the idea that, for example, the Indian Ocean has no stable essence or identity beyond the excitement it inspires in one excitable twenty-year-old sailor.

Although the Quartet's report briefly mentions the importance of the Arab Peace Initiative (API), in my view, the API should not be considered as a mere device for directing the negotiating process, but rather as the central framework for achieving a comprehensive peace.

Either way, he is a mere plot device here, the mechanism via which Cameron has revealed his absolute adherence to the rotten old conventions of British politics.

Both she and Ellena wanted Hermès to dispense with the archaic division between masculine and feminine scents — a mere marketing device designed to make heterosexual men comfortable with the idea of wearing fragrance.

The more the IOC (and indeed its spiritual twin, Fifa) continues to gift its sporting events to authoritarian regimes, the more they become one giant political demonstration, in which the athletes are a mere plot device.

The talk of generation Xenocrates reinterpreted as a mere pedagogical device; we hear about this technique from Aristotle, De caelo I 10. 279b32 280a2, and Simplicius' commentary ad loc.

Here we understand it as a mere mathematical device without any physical interpretation: Given a Hilbert space vector, an operator and its eigenvalues, the algorithm tells us how to calculate new numbers (which have the properties of probabilities).