The reply is:

Disputes may be settled in two ways. The first is to forbid each party from disputing with the other over the matter, since the dispute serves no useful purpose.

This is like two people disputing over the colour of the dog belonging to the Companions of the Cave, the dimensions of the Ark, or the part of the cow that Allah commanded be used for striking—assuming that a particular part was specified, although the apparent meaning of the Quran indicates that it was left unspecified. The same applies to similar matters that serve no useful purpose and which there may be no way of knowing. In such cases, each party is to be forbidden from disputing with the other; indeed, each is to be forbidden from speaking without knowledge.

The second is to settle the dispute by distinguishing error from truth.

Accordingly, when settling the dispute between those who disagree over “body,” they should be told:

Disputes are of two kinds: verbal and substantive.

If you are disputing over what the word “body” denotes in the language, it denotes neither what one of you claims—that anything self-subsisting or capable of being pointed to is called a body—nor what the other claims—that a body, in linguistic usage, is something composed of parts. For air and the like are, in the latter’s view, composite, yet the Arabs do not call air a body. It can also be pointed to and is self-subsisting, yet the Arabs do not call it a body.

Thus, neither of your statements accords with Arabic usage.

At most, this amounts to your adopting a conventional term for a particular meaning, like other conventional terminology. Their dispute would then resemble the jurists’ dispute over whether the term fard (obligatory) is synonymous with wājib