How can someone not have done this before? A new anonymously created website has compiled the 3,981 most-recent wedding announcements from the Times and turned them into a searchable database. Now, when strategizing your own wedding, you can research whether marrying a dentist or a veterinarian will better boost your chances of getting a coveted “Sunday Styles” slot. (It’s dentist, obv.) There’s some exciting news on there! For example, phrases like “met online,” “online dating,” “Facebook,” and “JDate” are common enough to have lifted, somewhat, the stigma of having met your mate through a website. Unfortunately, the fact that 26 percent of announcements have the word “cum laude” in them indicates that the stigma of average intelligence is still firmly in place.
In fact, as you might have guessed, Ivy League schools are mentioned a whopping 2,345 times (though thankfully many of those are overlaps). For you snobby spouse-hunters, here’s a breakdown of some of the top schools mentioned:
1) Columbia (615)
2) Harvard (466)
3) Yale (278)
4) Princeton (273)
5) Brown (226)
6) Cornell (206)
7) Duke (157)
8) Stanford (147)
9) Northwestern (99)
10) University of Pennsylvania (88)
This could seriously replace U.S. News & World Report’s collegiate list as the Most Important Meaningless College Ranking! (Actually, take this list with a grain of salt: Many of the Columbia listings are in reference to its hospitals, and MIT can’t be quantified because searches also pick up the word “commit.”)
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to search for specifically gay nuptials, even if you try searching “(right)” and “(left),” which are distinctions always included in same-sex listings with photos. Likewise, you can’t search for “stories that reveal unflattering personal details.” And most important — and somebody really has to do this someday — there’s no way to filter for “attractive.”
Wedding Credential [Official site]
