Episcopalians in decline, Hindus on the rise

For armchair sociologists, haters of the NY Times, and the flat out envious, the Times’ wedding announcements is a revealing projection and a finely-tuned barometer of what high status people think is high status. Of course the results are often unintentionally funny, irritating, or depressing, but what has changed over the years?

WASPs and debutantes have declined precipitously (Whit Stillman was right) and “bourgeois bohemian” values have made an appearance, but here are the trends over time as documented by word frequency analysis:

ATodd – When Harvard Met Sally: N-gram Analysis of the New York Times Weddings Section
The New York Times’s wedding section is a perfect natural experiment designed to answer the question: What do the world’s most self-important people think is important