low-key (Merriam-Webster):
quiet and relaxed : not very forceful, emotional, or noticeable
Deriving from that definition, to stay low-key means to not draw attention to yourself. Such behaviours that would fall under that would include not being too loud in how you speak, not getting into arguments with people, not taking a stand on issues and so on.
I'd never really thought about this one before now - but this mixing of 'so' and 'very' is very much a non-native 'tell'. Natives do it without thinking, of course, so when a non-native has to choose which to use, it's very noticeable to a native if they choose the wrong one.
So, how to pick which one?
This is the conclusion I came to...
You can use 'so' to mean 'very' but not always.
In a simple statement it works well.
Oh, this food is so good.
But in a lot of cases there is some element of comparison, which 'very' doesn't have.
Think of 'so' as having some kind of limit, some quantity or quality which is unstated but has a kind of invisible count.
I like it so ||||| much.
I don't like it so ||||| much, I only like it this ||| much...
That's not so ||||| much as if I liked it very (|||||||___) much.
'Very' doesn't have this 'count' or 'grade' hint to it, it's just 'a lot'.
I thought their last album was very good, but this one is not so good.
'So' in this last case has an 'invisible count' of whatever 'very' had just before, but failed to match up to that count.
Their last album was very good but this one is so much better.
Again, we've somehow quantified an uncountable 'very', put a value on it & made 'so' more than that.
Even if there's no value to compare to except ... life itself...
I don't like this sandwich so much
that's really comparing it to all the other sandwiches you've ever had, putting a value on them, then measuring it against your current sandwich's 'score'.
Best Answer
In my mind there is a subtle difference, although most people would view small and low values of x as meaning the same thing.
To me, 'low' is a comparison to 'normal' or 'high'. If 15,000 units is a typical value, 5,000 units could be a low value, even though it isn't a small value. If a normal score is 2, then a score of -43 would be very low.
A 'small' value to me is a measure of magnitude and indicates a value close to zero. It is somewhat dependent on the range of the data. If we're talking about data that ranges from -1 to 1, -0.0003 might be a small value and -0.75 could be a large value depending on the context. If we're talking about a range of 0 to 100, 20 could be a small value.