What do skills mean?

[Golem]

The other night, Fox explained that energy weapons are end-game weapons. You don't find any early in the game, but you do later on, and their power goes beyond your typical small guns.

For most of us, when we look at the long list of skills, they are meaningless. We might literally understand that the lockpicking skill makes our characters more successful at picking locks, but we can't put that into a meaningful context.

Now that you've had two months of experience with Fallout, what meaning would you assign to the skills?