In 1834 it was an insult so specific that a magistrate treated its use as provocation. By 1990 it appeared, without irony, in job advertisements. The trajectory is well attested and, in outline, unremarkable: words move. What makes this case worth examining is that the movement can be dated closely, and that the decisive step was taken by the people the word was used against. The first phase is ordinary semantic drift. The insult lost its precision, as insults do, and by the 1880s meant little more than *unpleasant person*. It survived in this weakened form for sixty years, appearing in fiction as a marker of mild coarseness. Had nothing else happened it would probably have expired quietly, as most such words do. What happened instead is documented in the newsletters of a trade association, of all places. In the late 1940s members began using the word about themselves. The usage is unmistakably deliberate and initially defensive; early instances are almost always accompanied by a gloss explaining that the writer is aware of the term's history and is using it anyway. Within a decade the gloss disappears. By the 1960s it is simply what members called each other, and the defensive edge is gone. Reclamation of this kind is well known to linguists and is usually described as a change of connotation. The archive suggests something more specific. What changed was not the feeling attached to the word but who was entitled to use it. For roughly twenty years it was an in-group term, and an outsider who used it was still committing an offence. The general rehabilitation came later, and came about largely because a generation of outsiders learned the word from insiders who used it approvingly and never encountered the older sense at all. This matters for a question that is usually asked badly. People argue about whether a word *really* means its old sense or its new one, as though meanings were properties of words. On the evidence of this case they are not. They are properties of a relationship between a word and a community, and the same string can carry two meanings simultaneously for as long as two communities are still in contact. The evidence for this is a set of misunderstandings recorded in the 1970s, when the word had completed its journey within the trade and not outside it. Several documented disputes turn on one party using it in the new sense and another hearing it in the old. Both were right about what it meant. Neither was right about what it meant to the other. The word is now entirely neutral and its history is not widely known. It appears in the trade's own official name, adopted in 1994 after a vote in which the question of the earlier sense was raised by one member and defeated by a margin of forty to one.