On the Ted radio hour, linguist Ann Curzan says she gets a lot of complaints about people using the pronoun they to refer to one person.
I sometimes get into arguments with people where they will say to me, but it can't be singular.
And I will say, but it is the history behind words causing a lot of debate.
That's on the Ted radio hour from NPR.
This is FRESH AIR.
I'm Tanya Moseley.
Back in the seventies, there were these questionable experiments that claimed to prove that plants could behave like humans, that they had feelings or could respond to music or even take a polygraph test.
Now, most of those claims have since been debunked, but a new wave of research suggests that plants are indeed intelligent in complex ways that challenge our very understanding of agency and consciousness.
That's the subject of a new book written by climate journalist Zoe Schlanger called the Light.
How the unseen World of Plant Intelligence offers a new understanding of life on earth.
In the book, Schlanger explores how plants do indeed communicate with each other, see and recognize other plants, store memories, and even learn.
Schlanker traveled around the world to explore the work of botanical researchers, to understand the debate among them on how to interpret the latest findings, which are sometimes at odds with our conception of what a plant actually is.
Zoe Schlanger is a staff reporter at the Atlantic, where she covers climate change.
She also writes the newsletter the Weekly Planet, which tells the story of life on a changing planet.
Her work has appeared in various publications, including the New York Times and the New York Review of Books.
Zoe Schlanger, welcome to Fresh Air.
It's wonderful to be with you.
I really enjoyed this book.
Very fascinating.
And, you know, from the moment I started to read it, I was thinking about how plant intelligence has been for such a long time, a highly contested idea, especially after some of that debunked research from the seventies.