Is there any difference in meaning between warrior and soldier? Are they totally synonymous?
Learn English – Difference between “warrior” and “soldier”
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maybe is an adverb, meaning perhaps or possibly.
may be is a verbal construction, formed of the modal verb may and the verb be, which can be used in sentences like “he may be in the office today”. Note that, if you were to rewrite this sentence with maybe, you would say “maybe he is in the office today”. Because maybe is an adverb, you need to add a verb to the sentence (is, a form of be, in that case).
Under the entry for laughable in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003), a note on synonyms has this side-by-side comparison of ludicrous and ridiculous:
LUDICROUS suggests absurdity that excites both laughter and scorn {a thriller with a ludicrous plot}. RIDICULOUS suggests extreme absurdity, foolishness, or contemptibility {a ridiculous display of anger}.
So the distinction between ludicrous and ridiculous, MW seems to assert, comes down to the difference between absurdity that may provoke scorn and absurdity that may provoke contempt, within a larger context in which both words involve "provoking laughter or mirth." In my experience, ludicrous tends to be used most often to describe a situation that has elements of farcical incongruity, whereas ridiculous is a more common, all-purpose term whose meaning amounts to "not to be taken seriously."
As the following Ngram chart for ludicrous (red line) versus ridiculous (blue line) for the period 1700–2005 indicates, the frequency of use of both terms in Google Books' database of published works has decreased slightly but fairly steadily for most of the past century, and the difference in frequency between the two words has remained remarkably consistent:
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Best Answer
Thursagen provides a good overview of the differences in connotations. The differences are however best considered literally (or etymologically rather), I feel.
warrior
i.e. Being a 'warrior' implies very generally that one fights in wars/battles (as the word itself suggests).
soldier
i.e. Being a 'soldier' implies being a payed member of an organised fighting force.
Overall then, you might consider a soldier to be a type of warrior, but not vice versa. The term 'warrior' is therefore often reserved for fighters in barbarian or unstructured armies, though it would not be incorrect to apply it to a member of the U.S. Army today, in fact.