Noncompositional

No, this is not some post talking about the relationship between the East Asian nation and my sport of choice. It’s just a link to some photos from my recent trip to Japan, and a notice that there’s a relatively long stretch of Sabre fencing in a recent commercial for the GMC Denali. As I recall, they talk about grace and performance, which I suppose fencing and SUVs have in common, or something. In recent years it seems that there’s been more fencing in commercials, though I could just be ignorant of prior incidents. I can remember off the top of my head fencing in commercials for Target, Silk soy milk, some financial company, Food Network…and at least a couple of others. The Denali commercial features Sabre fencing, the flavor closest in appearance to stage fencing, with lots of slashes and dramatic cuts. Interestingly, the next-to-last shot shows the fencer on the right doing a sort of jumping lunge (perhaps with the help of a cable, I didn’t catch it with enough attention to see how realistic it looked) while the other fencer ducks and presents the tip of his (or her) blade: the final shot shows that tip contacting the right side of the lunging fencer’s upper torso. However, if I have my sabre rules correct (and I might not), if the lunging fencer manages a successful cut to the mask, then they should have priority, and thus the point.

Oh, you wanted something linguistic? Well, it seems that denali is the (west-central) Athabaskan name for Mt. McKinley, translating (according to most web sources) as `the high one.’ Don’t know anything about the morphology of the language, so at the moment I’m assuming it’s an adjective with person/number/etc morphology on it.