Post History

I admit I'm unschooled at Googling! Only after I wrote this post, did I stumble on Draconis's [answer on Latin SE](https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/17267).

>While _emō_ normally means "buy", the ancestral meaning seems to have been something like "take". Compare the Proto-Slavic cognate *_ę-ti_ "take, acquire", or the distant Latin relative _pōmus_ "fruit" (the first part is cognate with Greek _apo_: fruit is "something taken off/away from" the tree). And indeed, this is the meaning we see in most prefixed forms: _adimō_ "deprive", _dēmō_ "remove".
>
>So the original meaning of _perimō_ seems to have been something like "take away thoroughly and completely"—that is, "cause to vanish". And indeed, in Classical times this still seems to be its most common meaning: Cicero in _De Divinatione_, for example, describes how the full moon was _subitō perempta est_ (i.e. eclipsed). But from there, "cause to vanish" poetically meaning "kill, destroy" is an easy step.