The best-known elements of urban popular English speech are all represented in the Oxford English Dictionary, but a faintly proscriptive attitude lingers on in the relative disregard for the origins and early history of such terms, which are often classified as cant, slang, gypsy jargon, popular, and so on. Entries in the dictionary for the four words considered in this note, slum, bloke, slut, and slattern -- all without satisfactory etymologies -- carry caveats that they have not been updated for over a century. It is to be hoped that the more ample historical information that is increasingly found in the OED Online will remedy this dearth, although a change in attitude must accompany the change in technology.