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My husband is a physicist, and he hates talking about his work simply because he's met too many physicists who won't shut up about physics. (At a party, glass of wine in hand? Sure, let's talk about entangled states ad infinitum...)A good way to avoid people hassiing is to have a really basic answer to give them. So rather than saying, "I'm not going to tell you," you say, "It's a murder mystery set in Paris." Or "It's an urban fantasy with pixies." Just a basic quick sentence. That's often all people really want to know anyway.
But people outside the field genuinely are curious about what he does, and so he (gently) puts them off using exactly your technique.
"Ooh, you study physics? What do you work on?"
"Oh, just gravity."
"What, like, outer space stuff?"
"Yeah, quantum gravity. It's mainly a bunch of math."
Of course, he could jabber on about black holes, wormholes, and gravastars, and his audience would probably appreciate that up to a point--but when he's interacting with people, he wants to do social, human stuff, not discuss intellectual abstractions. He separates his work and his play pretty ruthlessly.