Definition

To decline or deteriorate in quality or value; to become less than what is considered normal or acceptable

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Excerpts from News Articles

It leads to a gradual degeneration of the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye. People with the condition gradually lose their sight and the speed of their vision loss can vary dramatically.

Logo 2023-02-27 EURO News

Professional football players are one-and-a-half times more likely to develop dementia than the general population, a new study has suggested. The study, published in The Lancet Public Health journal, analyzed the medical records of more than 6,000 male footballers in Sweden's top division from 1924 to 2019. Researchers compared the footballers' rates of a range of degenerative brain disorders with 56,000 Swedish men across similar age groups. It found that almost 9 percent of footballers developed a neurodegenerative disease, compared to 6.2 percent within the general population.

Logo 2023-03-17 CGTN

Trump reacted to the indictment—which he called “Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history”—by lashing out at President Biden and “Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by George Soros.” Recently, Trump characterized Bragg, who is Black, as a “racist” and called him a “ degenerate psychopath” and “human scum.”

Logo 2023-03-31 The New Yorker

Donald Trump’s campaign against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been aggressive, even by the Republican’s standards. The former president last week called the prosecutor “a degenerate psychopath that truely [sic] hates the USA.” Soon after, Trump said Bragg is “doing the work of Anarchists and the Devil.”

Logo 2023-03-31 MSNBC News

Since then, they have supported each other through the pain of bereavement as well as several health issues. “We both lost our parents,” says Nancy. “Having each other helped.” Since the early 00s, Al has had many operations for degenerative disc disease, a spinal condition that has caused him extreme pain. He was later diagnosed with bowel cancer and is still receiving treatment. “We have had some really rough times,” says Al. “But we still always have fun together and she takes care of me.”

Logo 2023-04-03 The Guardian

He said: “Africa should provide the lead to save the world from this degeneration and decadence, which is really very dangerous for humanity. If people of opposite sex [sic] stop appreciating one another then how will the human race be propagated?”

Logo 2023-04-03 The Guardian

As more and more species are lost from a given ecosystem, the risk of the whole ecosystem ceasing to be what it’s supposed to be increases. For example, what happens when a healthy forest loses many of its critical trees, shrubs, insects, and other forms of life? Can you still call it a forest, or does it become something else? Does it degenerate into a grassland?


Eyelids can also develop skin cancers. The upper eyelid, which is usually not exposed on the outside when our eyes are open, is particularly at risk when we lie on the beach with our eyes closed without protection. Finally, UV light predisposes us to macular degeneration , which is a damage to our best retinal cells and can result in varying degrees of vision loss.

Logo 2023-04-07 The Conversation

Optimism about social and technological progress was tempered with anxieties about decadence, degeneration , addiction, atavism, and other perils. And Darwinism—social as well as natural—suggested powerful ways to understand and master the dynamics of all these processes, for good and ill. As we shall see, Huey had all these hopes and fears very much in mind when he made his remarks about reading’s marvelous and mysterious power. They played a signal part in motivating his pursuit of a scientific approach to the practice.

Logo 2023-04-07 Literary Hub

In a column for Saturday’s Daily Mail, he wrote: “Once you resort to personal abuse, you create the risk that Britain’s public discourse will degenerate even further – to the levels that we have seen recently in the US.”

Logo 2023-04-08 The Independent

“Africa should provide the lead to save the world from this degeneration and decadence, which is really very dangerous for humanity,” he said.

Logo 2023-04-10 RT News

It turned out that he had macular degeneration , an eye disease that can result in severe, permanent vision loss. In his case, the condition could be managed so long as he injected the drug into his eye every two months.

Logo 2023-04-10 Channel NewsAsia

Mandatory retirement might be a thing at some places of work in the US and beyond, but for a certain stature of man, it is evidently not something that needs to be worried about. The idea of giving way to someone a few years younger, to say nothing of a few decades, does not appear to loom large in their minds, degenerated or otherwise. On they all go, really putting the ancient into ancient wisdom.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Guardian

Cardiologist Omar Mejía Rivera told Noticias Telemundo that “sadly, we ‘ve seen that the degenerative illness because of blocked arteries” is now more prevalent in young patients.

Logo 2023-04-11 MSNBC News

Just when it seemed that Wren’s reputation was secure, however, the Gothic Revival, with its obsession with morality and medievalism, began to fight back. Pugin dismissed English baroque as degenerate and announced that St Paul’s was a meagre imitation of Italian paganism. John Ruskin sneered at St Paul’s and deplored the English Renaissance (the entire Renaissance, in fact) as a regrettable lapse after the sublime purity of the Gothic.

Logo 2023-04-12 The Spectator

‘Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce,’ he once explained. That’s true, yet Portis was selling himself short.

Logo 2023-04-13 Literary Hub

“It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas … Portis’s other novels weren’t exactly Westerns—more like Southwesterns, Headed Easterns, and Getting Losterns—but they are all populated by equally memorable figures…It’s absurdly fun to follow his oddballs and their odysseys, but something more than fun, too. Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country … ‘Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce,’ he once explained. That’s true, yet Portis was selling himself short.

Logo 2023-04-13 Literary Hub

Some of her other items, like the miniskirt and short shorts known as hot pants, were unabashedly provocative. “Old gentlemen would come and shake their sticks outside the shop window and yell ‘ degenerate ’ and ‘obscene,’” Ms. Quant recalled.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Washington Post

The most self-revealing letter he ever wrote, “a dialogue between the head and the heart,” was sent to Maria Cosway, an Anglo-Italian beauty who left him utterly infatuated. Jefferson and Cosway, who was married to a prominent if somewhat degenerate English miniaturist, spent several months in a romantic haze, touring Parisian gardens, museums, and art shows together, but whether Jefferson’s head or heart prevailed, either in the letter or in life, is impossible to know. Meanwhile, there is considerable evidence to suggest, but not to prove conclusively, that Jefferson initiated a sexual liaison with his attractive young mulatto slave Sally Hemings in 1788, about the time his torrid affair with Cosway cooled down—this despite his public statements denouncing blacks as biologically inferior and sexual relations between the races as taboo.


The number of anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations in Florida has soared in recent months. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project documented 17 such episodes during 2022, up sharply from the six that the organization chronicled in 2021 and the five that were recorded in 2020. Some degenerated into riots. Nationwide, Florida ranked third in these incidents, surpassed only by California and Texas.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Guardian

Gathro has degenerative disc disease and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, resulting in joint pain, weakness and loss of mobility. Because of her disabilities, going to a show meant having to secure accessible seating after hourslong phone calls with her “nemesis,” Ticketmaster; finding a friend to drive her or arranging other transportation; and hoping her body would cooperate enough for her to actually go out.

Logo 2023-04-14 The New York Times

But this one is probably the closest to a self-portrait. The character of Georg has the same disease my father had – a rare degenerative condition called Benson’s syndrome. When I was writing the screenplay, he was still alive and I was visiting him, like Georg’s daughter Sandra in the film.

Logo 2023-04-16 The Guardian

Putin has frequently espoused “traditional values” in his speeches and framed gender-transition surgery and same-sex parenting as morally degenerate Western imports. In December he signed a law expanding Russia’s restrictions on promoting what it calls “gay propaganda,” in effective outlawing any public expression of LGBTQ behavior in Russia.

Logo 2023-04-17 MSNBC News

“The Dog of the South” sounds shaggy, and it is; so is almost everything else Portis wrote. “Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce,” he once explained.

Logo 2023-04-17 The New Yorker

"We must never degenerate into a system where everyone thinks they deserve more relative to others," he said.

Logo 2023-04-18 Channel NewsAsia

His assurances may not be very reassuring, however, because his similarly blithe predictions that he had the votes to win the speakership in January degenerated into a farcical process that saw him make huge concessions to his party’s most radical members and required 15 ballots before he finally won the job of his dreams.

Logo 2023-04-18 CNN News

How this could be happening in a rich country such as Britain? There are treatments for common blindness-causing conditions such as macular degeneration , but to get them patients must be able to access the service. And right now the NHS doesn’t have the capacity to deliver them in a timely way.

Logo 2023-04-19 The Guardian

For hockey fans, it's the best time of the year – the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs. But the physical aspect of playing the game has led to increased concerns about potential links between hockey and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). National Hockey League (NHL) Commissioner Gary Bettman says he remains unconvinced that there are any connections between the degenerative brain disease and playing NHL hockey.

Logo 2023-04-19 NPR

Royal sex dolls may currently be just a fantasy. But a couple of weeks out from King Charles’s coronation, isn’t it heartening to imagine the possibility that there are degenerates who hear frustrated republican cries of “screw the royals” and interpret them completely the wrong way? Cockburn is watching this space.

Logo 2023-04-20 The Spectator

“And the Cops [Conference of the parties climate summits] are the ultimate proof of this. Yes, there’s more intention to them, but the Cops themselves have degenerated into kind of an annual theatre for pretending that we’re doing something about global warming while, in fact, we’re just letting fuel be poured on the fire.”

Logo 2023-04-21 The Guardian

Sturgeon’s family is having his brain tested for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain condition resulting from repeated head injuries that can cause aggression. Their lawyer pointed out that Sturgeon suffered multiple concussions while playing high school basketball.

Logo 2023-04-22 RT News

‘These shootings are no longer simply a question of territorial control but are degenerating into a vendetta that goes beyond the boundaries of the city,’ explained the Marseille police prefect Frédérique Camilleri.

Logo 2023-04-22 The Spectator

In February 2000, Mike Huddleston was traveling for a training. He had flown from Maryland to San Francisco and needed to get to a rental car agency. But because of a degenerative neuromuscular condition that weakens his muscles, he wouldn't be able to climb the stairs of the shuttle bus.

Logo 2023-04-24 NPR

Lewis, 75, disclosed his diagnosis in a brief video posted to Twitter on Sunday, saying he learned he had Parkinson's, a chronic degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, two years ago after he began walking stiffly and shuffling his feet.

Logo 2023-04-24 Reuters

This word has medieval Norse roots meaning ‘to be feared or dreaded’. ‘Ugly’ associations leave behind a trail of bedfellows: monstrous, grotesque, deformed, freak, degenerate , handicapped. With its storied history, ugliness grows from many sources: from Aristotle who called women ‘deformed’ men, to medieval transformation tales of hags-turned-beauties, to 18th-century caricatures, 19th-century ‘freak’ shows, 20th-century ‘ degenerate ’ art and people, Brutalist architecture, and more. Ugliness has long posed a challenge to aesthetics and taste, and complicated what it means to be beautiful and valued.