Skill is an ability to do something *well*; perhaps a particular foundational ability - to prepare food, to stay in the black, to know when to speak and when to remain quiet, to nurse a fragile person, to take a set of material objects and mobilise and modify and configure them to good purpose. Expertise, in its good sense - distinct from the disdain that we spit out towards ‘the experts’ who stand opposed to us in regimes of administered authority and power - is the capacity (the ensemble of labour-powers, the array of skills, the cornucopia of literacies in the collective) to do something *very* well, uncommonly well: meet high expectations, skilfully marshal available forces, do difficult things.
It is with admiration that we speak of something as requiring or having been performed with ‘great skill’. We (actually, only some of us.) stand in awe and respect, and delight in the presence of the piece of furniture, the embroidered fabric or tailored garment, the garden, the dancer, the gymnast, the musician, the festival sound-stage; and the elegance and grace of what we see and intuit to have been visioned and considered and rehearsed and performed, at some previous point in the trajectory of this material stuff or performance.
In our admiration and our in-the-rhythms-of-the-flesh recognition, we acknowledge the late Old English root, *scele* (knowledge), and the Old Norse *skil*: discernment. We are glad to see choices having been made so well, in such close touch with resources and material fabric and outcomes and recipients’ lives and beating hearts: with such a well tuned sense of **the suchness of things**.