Is it semantic bleaching?

That's awesome! :)

Craig in Arcata

Indeed, the original denotation of the "starve" was 'to die'
(which is what the German equivalent, "sterben", still means).

I think semantic bleaching is the term you're looking for here,
though bleaching is not just something that leads to impotency.
It's also an essential part of the process by which grammatical
morphemes evolve. Thus the auxiliary "have" in the English
perfect (e.g. as in "I have climbed he greasy pole") has been bleached
of any sense of possession. And the "go" in "It's gonna rain tonight"
has lost its original motion sense.

But in none of these cases, or even in the case of "starve" or "terribly",
have these words become "impotent", exactly. In some ways, they're
even more powerful, since they all now have a much wider range
of applicability.