Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.

The Duchess offers this maxim in chapter 9 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll builds it from a recognizable proverb about pennies and pounds, replacing money with sense and sounds. The surrounding conversation is full of the Duchess's determination to extract morals from everything. The line is therefore a verbal joke inside a satire of advice, rather than a straightforward writing manual delivered by Carroll.

Its altered proverb nevertheless gives a reader something interesting to consider. Sound can make a sentence feel wise before its meaning has been examined. A pleasing rhythm and familiar structure can carry an assertion surprisingly far. Carroll invites enjoyment of that process while exposing it. Meaning and sound do not arrange themselves quite as automatically as the Duchess suggests, and the advice becomes funniest when one notices how confidently its neatness pretends to settle the matter under discussion.

The attentive grey cat on the windowsill gives the distinction a quiet visual partner. Ears can turn toward a noise long before anything about its significance has been decided. Humans sometimes reverse the caution and accept an impressive sound as sufficient sense. The picture offers a small pause between the two. A sentence may deserve another moment of thought even when it has already succeeded at sounding like something worth repeating.