Killing Me Softly With His Hebrew

I learned my first Hebrew verb paradigm... The root is KTL, the word is katal. My grammar makes use of the same word repeatedly throughout in order to learn all the various methods of conjugating person, gender, and number, but nowhere did I find an explanation of what the word actually means. I looked in the back, which gives all the vocabulary taught in the grammar, but katal wasn't there.

So I'm thinking, if I'm going to be saying this word over and over again--many times out loud, I would at least like to know what I'm actually saying. So I took out my trusty Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and Enlish Lexicon and looked it up. To my surprise, the word I am chanting over and over again in different forms is "kill" (slay/slaughter to be more precise). Pretty morbid. I wonder why the author didn't feel like disclosing this to his students...