At the risk of metaquibbling, foil and epee do have the ‘flick’, where you exploit the fact that the blade is flexible enough to be whipped around the guard. I don’t know whether the speed of the point quite matches that of saber when doing one(since you don’t generally get to do a proper swing unless you want it to be very obvious that you are about to depart from poking); but the fact that you can get the blade to bend like that does allow a class of slash-like attacks to register despite the scoring system being designed for thrusts only. That’s probably why they upset the purists(that, and somebody trying to flick you is a great way of getting really painful bruising of your dominant hand, which is just annoying).
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