Two Pāli terms with ariya in them that modern Theravada points the wrong way — one deflated, one inflated.
Noble silence. SN 21.1 has Mahā Moggallāna ask the question outright — katamo nu kho ariyo tuṇhībhāvo — and answer it with the second jhāna formula word for word, closing ayaṃ vuccati ariyo tuṇhībhāvo. That is definitional language, and SA 501 has it too. It is also explicitly set against ordinary vocal silence, which the suttas name separately as tuṇhībhāva.
Now put the two claims side by side. The Visuddhimagga lineage teaches that jhāna is effectively out of reach — one in a million, don’t get your hopes up, do dry insight instead. The same tradition prints “maintain noble silence” on the daily schedule handed to first-time meditators. All day. In the dining hall, on the walking path, whatever posture they’re in.
Plug in the sutta definition and that instruction reads: hold second jhāna or better from breakfast to lights-out, while queuing for rice. One of those two positions has to go.
There’s a bonus in it for the vitakka & vicāra question. Why is the entry bar the second jhāna? Under the redefined jhāna of the commentaries you already can’t speak or think in the first — so noble silence should have started there. It doesn’t; it starts at avitakkaṃ avicāraṃ. Speech has already ceased in first jhāna (SN 36.11); thinking ceases in the second, and that is the one called noble. Which is also why V&V are vacī-saṅkhāra (MN 44).
Ariya-sāvaka. Nearly every translator gives “noble disciple” — a disciple who is himself noble, so at minimum a stream-enterer. But the term is only ever contrasted with assutavā puthujjano: over 200 hits for ariyasāvak, zero for an-ariyasāvaka. And MN 22.10 turns the distinction on exposure rather than attainment — ariyānaṃ dassāvī, one who has seen the noble ones. The nobility in that sentence belongs to the people being seen.
Read it as “disciple of the noble ones” and a pile of oddities stops being odd: SN 45.8 (why would stream entry be the price of abandoning wrong livelihood?), MN 125.3.1 (a monk noble on day one), Iti 82, AN 7.69/MA 2, AN 5.57 (an enlightened disciple becoming enlightened again), MA 198, MN 117.5 (an arahant who isn’t a “noble disciple”).
Both moves put the goal somewhere you never have to measure yourself against it. Read the terms as defined and it reverses: the silence is something you actually have to attain, and the discipleship is something you can start this afternoon.