And I don't refer to the baseball playerbaseball player.
I was asked today for a word which would indicate the changing of something considered bad into something good. But this isn't about "improvement." This is about the transformation, that singular inverting moment. The example given to me was "xxx did not deny he was a racist but insisted that racism, more than a necessary evil was a good thing." His action of recontextualizing or reunderstanding a negative as a positive -- does that have a word?
I could say phrases like "he turned it on its head" or "made it its opposite" or "converts his gyves to graces", or I could just coin the titular "engooden" but I'd sort of like a real word which, as a specific verb, explicitly crystallizes the idea.