What was going on at MacNichol’s Pencraft University?  I found a glimpse into its actions through Doubt.  Apparently, MacNichol was using Fort’s books to teach writing.  Exactly how is unclear, although I suspect that he may have used them help students generate story ideas.  Certainly, Robert Barbour Johnson thought the books were good for that.

MacNichol was also using General Semantics.  Indeed, he gave a paper at a General Semantics conference, “Experiments with a Simplified Method in Teaching General Semantics to Writers.”  Again, exactly how he used General Semantics is unknown.  And I don’t know more than a glossing of General Semantics, but there seems to have been a fairly strong connection between it and Forteanism.

Tiffany Thayer was initially dismissive, but then became enthusiastic, as did a number of science fiction writers with Fortean connections.  Certainly, there seems to be an elective affinity between General Semantics and Forteanism, if I understand General Semantics correctly.

General Semantics was a philosophy developed by Alfred Korzybski in the first half of the twentieth century that was based on the premise that human thinking is limited by the structure of the brain and the languages human use.  This could explain Fortean events as, for example, irruptions from a universe that could not be fully comprehended by the brain or fully explained by language.