an objection to the language used by a team and by the authors of its evidence, rather than an objection to a specific policy

In Policy Debate, a kritik (derived from German kritik, meaning and pronounced as "critique", and often abbreviated K) is generally a type of argument that challenges a certain mindset, assumption, or discursive element that exists within the advocacy of the opposing team, often from the perspective of critical theory; it is often spelled in the normal English critique or is sometimes called a criticism, and takes the adjective form kritikal (meaning and pronounced as "critical"). A kritik can either be deployed by the negative team to challenge the affirmative advocacy or by the affirmative team to indict the status quo or the negative advocacy. Kritiks (and their German spelling) were developed by teams at The University of Texas, coached by Bill Shanahan, in the late 1980s out of an existing "single-citizen" argumentation paradigm which called for the judge to vote a single citizen's conscience rather than adopting the role of the federal government.