>It's a male-heavy class and when these terms come up, they tend to laugh it off as some kind of esotherical side-quest.
It is a sort of side quest. You think the discussion is about something profound but really you're just discussing English vocabulary.
You're taking arbitrary symbols/words with arbitrarily vague meanings and trying to demarcate an exact meaning as if the words exist intrinsically in reality. They don't, all words are made up.
It's like I make up this word "mokadan" and I define it as the difference in emotion between what a dog feels for its human owner and what a human owner feels for his dog.
You see what I did there? you can talk about that mokadan for days trying to pin down whats going on with the word but it's just something that's arbitrarily made up by me. I can make up other vague concepts as well and assign it random vocab like "somofin": the shape that is exactly in between a hexagon and semicircle. And now a group of people can spend days trying draw what that shape exactly is. Sort of a pointless endeavor down what I call linguistic trap doors that disguise themselves as deep concepts.
The thing with human language is that all of it is made up. All language consists of made up words and symbols attached to arbitrary definitions. The languages are so entrenched in our brains that we often can't see the difference between actual concepts and vague vocabulary. So often We get stuck in discussing what is simply linguistic phenomena like what is the difference between "sympathy" and "empathy." Other trap doors include what is "life" or what is "sentience".
The vagueness of the word is arbitrary because humans picked to define the word vaguely. The vagueness is manufactured, it's artificial. There's no real point in trying to unroll all of it.
You commented on how you were in a male dominated class implying that there's something inherit with males being too simplistic and laughing off the discussion.
I think the opposite is true. The "males" who laughed it off are in a higher plane of meta understanding and they comprehend the pointlessness of trying to demarcate vague vocabulary. They were right to laugh it off in my opinion.
I was in a class that were mostly females and when they tried to veer off the discussion into one of these linguistic traps. I attempted to explain to them the concept of the linguistic trap they were falling for but my efforts were in vain. They were perplexed by my explanation and still didn't understand. They continued down that trap door and ended up wasting everyone's time.