In this video, the performer identifies himself as “Bishop Bullwinkle, from The First Church Of Nothing But The Truth.” While I’m almost positive he’s using a nom de chaire* , I’m curious if there’s any possibility his name is actually Bullwinkle. Has that every been a popular (or even obscure but not unheard-of) boy’s name?
*While most clergy work and minister under their own names, I’ve driven by more than one church where the name of the preacher on the marquee is obviously made up. For example, Rev. Mr. Big Stuff, Shepherdess Coco Chanel Jones.
Bullwinkle J. Moose (the cartoon character) was named after a car dealer named Clarence Bullwinkle, because the cartoon creators thought that the name Bullwinkle just sounded funny. The middle initial J comes from Jay Ward, one of the creators. Rocky the Flying Squirrel also has the middle initial J for the same reason. His full name is Rocket J. Squirrel. Rocky is a nickname.
According to the MyHeritage web site, there are 2,246 people with the Bullwinkle surname. There’s probably a few more out there that the web site doesn’t know about.
While Bullwinkle is a real surname, and it is definitely possible for someone to have that name, Bishop Bullwinkle is actually the performing name of an artist named Bernard Thomas. So there is no possibility that his real name is Bullwinkle.
According to this Mental Floss article, Bullwinkle J. Moose was named after a friend of Jay Ward’s, Clarence Bullwinkel (note the spelling), so yes, I’d say it’s possible. Maybe not as a first name, but definitely a surname.
I see that one of the first famous Bullwinkles was Captain Ben Bullwinkle,
who was infamously head of the firebrigade at the time of the great Chicago fire.
(was it “great” ? ) and so was in charge of actioning the change from lessons learnt and brainstorming , so as to upgrade firebrigade capability and effectiveness.
(put more water on movable trucks… with trucks movable to places required. fire hydrants ready to accept hoses, etc etc etc)
I looked through the Social Security death index and, at least of people who have died with a social security number, I could not find anyone name Bullwinkle or Bullwinkel as a first name.
I used Google n-gram for both “Bullwikle” and “Bullwinkel”. There are lots of references to both (with “Bullwinkle” surprisingly being the more common), but only as last names.
This site claims that “Bullwinkle” is used as a last name 90% of the time, but 10% of the time as a first name. Alas, it gives no examples:
I grabbed the list of baby names from the SSA and grepped for anything with “bull” in it. One hit and not remotely “Bullwinkle”.
Caveat: To make the list there has to be at least 5 people given that name in a year. I would be surprised if there were 5 in one year given that name. But then again there were 15 "Zoltan"s born in 2015.
As noted above, Zoltan is a very common Hungarian name (in the top 25). I’m almost surprised there were only 15 born in the US, but, then again, the population of Hungarians in the US is not terribly high. Looks like 883 entries in the Social Security Death Index (through February 2014).
That video is labelled “Bull Winka” which might be even less common.
I was going to say that traditionally priests are called Father Lastname so Bishop Bullwinkle, though not the correct form of address, would still be referring to their last name.
