mess up vs sort out

mess up

verb
  • To damage; injure. 

  • To manhandle; beat up; rough up. 

  • To make a mess of; to untidy, disorder, soil, or muss. 

  • To botch, bungle; to perform poorly on. 

  • To cause a problem with; to introduce an error or mistake in; to make muddled or confused; spoil; ruin. 

  • To cause (another person) to make unwanted mistakes in a given task, usually through distraction or obnoxious behavior. 

  • To make a mistake; to do something incorrectly; to perform poorly. 

  • To discombobulate, utterly confuse, or confound psychologically; to throw into a state of mental disarray. 

sort out

verb
  • To attack physically. 

  • To provide (somebody) with a necessity, or a solution to a problem. 

  • To fix, as a problem. 

  • To separate from the remainder of a group; often construed with from. 

  • To clarify by reviewing mentally. 

  • To arrange. 

  • To organise or separate into groups, as a collection of items, so as to make tidy. 

How often have the words mess up and sort out occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )