Definition
1 : to strike out, obliterate, or mark for deletion
3 : to eliminate from one's consciousness
In medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, a series of dots was used to mark mistakes or to label material that should be deleted from a text, and those deletion dots can help you remember the history of expunge. They were known as puncta delentia. The puncta part of the name derives from the Latin verb pungere, which can be translated as "to prick or sting" (and you can imagine that a scribe may have felt stung when their mistakes were so punctuated in a manuscript). Pungere is also an ancestor of expunge, as well as a parent of other dotted, pointed, or stinging terms such as punctuate, compunction, poignant, puncture, and pungent.
The damn scuzz demons were back. True, it was the season for them - they came with the monsoon and its rain and the damp caused by the remnants of the summer heat, but i'd already spent the previous week driving them out and purging them from the bathrooms, cloakrooms and passageways of our guest house, smacking their little putrid green bodies out of the nearest window or door with my specialised broom, scrubbing their sticky hand and foot prints off of the floors, walls, ceilings, windows and every piece of furniture and fabric their wretched little arms could reach. It had taken me days to cleanse them from the building.
And now one had appeared before me in the pantry. And if one appears, the rest of the tribe aren't far behind.
I locked eyes with the disgusting creature. If I could just get it out of here before it laid its scent trackers which alerted and guided the rest of its tribe to a prime habitat, then I could avoid the invasion altogether,
I clenched my fists around my broom.
Time to go to war.
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