critically

Here the adverb measures severity, and it almost always sits before a word of harm or danger: critically ill, critically injured, critically endangered. It tells how close something is to the edge, not how anyone judges it. A critically injured passenger and a critically reviewed film use different senses. The first belongs here, while the second belongs to the critics' meaning.

This sense measures timing and position. Bishop Burnet has someone coming critically the night before the session, and a fortification can be critically situated. It follows verbs of arriving, placing or happening. At the head of a sentence (Critically, the evidence surfaced in time), it shades toward "decisively" and flags the turn on which events depend.

Fault-finding is the point here: the eye that lands on the frayed carpet. Its neighbor the discerning sense shares the same verbs (examine, read, look), so context has to decide. Critically examining an argument can mean weighing it fairly or picking it apart. When disapproval is meant, nearby words usually signal it: the flaws, the weak points, a frayed carpet.

Here the critics are people, not an attitude: critically acclaimed, critically applauded. Because the adverb names who is doing the judging, it pairs as readily with praise as with blame, so a critically applauded film is a well-reviewed one, not a faulted one. It often stands opposite commercially, separating a success with reviewers from a success with audiences.

Judgment without condemnation. John Dryden, in 1685, sets critically beside discern and distinguish, the work of telling good writers from bad and a proper style from a corrupt one. Nothing is rejected; the task is sorting. That neutral weighing is what survives when a teacher asks students to read their sources critically: test them, rather than find fault with them.