better than nothing vs so-so

better than nothing

adj

  • Barely useful; almost worthless or pointless, but nevertheless better than having nothing at all. 

so-so

adj

  • Neither good nor bad; tolerable, passable, indifferent. 

adv

  • Neither very well nor very poorly. 

How often have the words better than nothing and so-so occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )