The Do's and Don't's of Agreeable Conversation : Page 188

Much as I respect my colleagues in college teaching, I have long learned never in a general gathering to allow the topic of discussion to come within a stone's throw of anyone's doctoral dissertation. When a man has, for example, spent two years in burrowing through incunabula in tracing the phonological changes in Spanish of the Latin / in facere to the h in haber, one can sympathize with him if he yearns for a chance to throw his knowledge about a room for an hour. But the fact is that for even the average scholar the topic is merely worth an extensive footnote, not a whole appendix. Becoming technical or subclassificatory on one's specialty is akin to the matter of talking shop.