The Duchess’s sentence rewrites a familiar English maxim—“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves”—as linguistic advice: prioritize meaning (“sense”) and sound or style will follow. On its face, the aphorism endorses clarity over ornament, urging Alice to get her ideas straight rather than fuss over wording, rhyme, or euphonious phrasing. Yet in Wonderland, this principle is comically unstable. The Duchess treats language like a moral vending machine, cranking out prefabricated lessons that often misfit the moment. Her claim that “sense” guarantees “sounds” rings hollow precisely because her own “sense” is dubious—she readily agrees that mustard is a mineral and imagines a “mustard-mine.” Readers hear a second irony: throughout the book, Alice’s botched recitations preserve meter and sound while meaning slips into parody, suggesting that sound often overwhelms sense rather than automatically aligning with it. Thus the line asserts an ideal—sense first—but Carroll plants it in a mouth that confuses categories, inviting us to question whether Wonderland’s speech can ever let sense lead. The proverb-parody becomes a wry comment on education and rhetoric, where rote form (sounds) routinely eclipses understanding (sense).