After seeing my post on the sister blog that discussed the economic success of the so-called cognitive elite (quick summary, surprising only to some op-ed columnists: if you want to be super-rich, it helps to either inherit the money or come from a very well-off or very well-educated family), Todd Schneider sent me this graph:
Schneider writes:
The graph comes from WeddingCrunchers.com — it’s like the Google Books Ngram viewer, but the corpus is NYT wedding announcements dating back to 1981. I also wrote up my take on it in an essay titled When Harvard Met Sally, discussing my favorite trends (hint: Ivy League, investment banks, religion, etc…)
Since you’re a keen observer of political trends, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that the prevalence of the word “Democrat” in NYT wedding announcements has far outpaced the frequency of “Republican” in recent years (but not in the 1980s!).
A percentage of 0.015 is pretty small, but a trend’s a trend!
P.S. Just to give you a sense of what’s going on, here are some examples:
Aug 10, 2008: Courtney O’Grady Gregoire, a daughter of Gov. Christine O. Gregoire of Washington and Michael J. Gregoire, was married on Saturday to Scott Philip Lindsay, a son of Susan B. Lindsay and Dr. Philip G. Lindsay of Seattle. The Rev. Michael J. Ryan, a Roman Catholic priest, officiated at the governor’s mansion in Olympia.
Jul 26, 1998: Mara Buell Raphael, a Washington-based producer for CNN, was married yesterday to James Wightman Wilcox, who was until last week the press secretary to Representative Bill Archer, Republican of Texas. The Rev. Andrew Osmun officiated at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Middlebury, Vt.