degenerate vs melt away

degenerate

verb
  • To lose good or desirable qualities. 

  • To cause to lose good or desirable qualities. 

noun
  • One who is degenerate, who has fallen from previous stature. 

adj
  • Having lost good or desirable qualities. 

  • Having deteriorated, degraded or fallen from normal, coherent, balanced and desirable to undesirable and typically abnormal; an immoral or corrupt person. 

  • Having the same quantum energy level. 

  • Having multiple domain elements correspond to one element of the range. 

  • Having multiple different (linearly independent) eigenvectors. 

melt away

verb
  • To fade or wane 

How often have the words degenerate and melt away occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )