The popular notion of geography

The scene was typical of that extraordinary ritual known as the Cocktail Party. Groping for something else to fill the silence, she got in her words first.
-'And what do you do?' she said.
-'Oh,' I said, grateful for the usual filler, 'I'm a geographer.'
And even as I said it, I felt the safe ground turning into familiar quagmire. She did not have to ask the next question, but she did anyway.
-'Oh really, a geographer... and what do geographers do?'

It has happened many times, and it seldom gets better. That awful feeling of desperate foolishness when you, a professional geographer, find yourself incapable of explaining simply and shortly to others what you really do. One could say, 'I look at the world from a spatial perspective, in a sense through spatial spectacles,' or 'Well, actually I'm a spatial analyst,' both of which would be true up to a point. But such phrases convey no meaning to most people, and leave them suspecting that you need a new oculist, or perhaps an analyst of different sort. In a desperate attempt to build a bridge with familiar words, one ends up saying, 'Well, actually, I teach geography.'
-'Oh really?' and laughing. 'What's the capital of North Dakota?'

P. Gould in The Geographer at Work