Meaning

This line playfully inverts the usual relationship between meaning and sound in language. The joke is that it echoes a well-known piece of practical advice, "take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves," but substitutes abstract linguistic terms in place of monetary ones. The result is a line that sounds like wisdom but dissolves into absurdity on closer inspection, which is entirely the point.

Context

The Duchess delivers this line in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel, and it is a good example of how Carroll used his characters to parody the moralizing habit common in Victorian children's literature. Adults in that era frequently offered children tidy aphorisms meant to teach good conduct, and Carroll delighted in constructing sentences that had the shape and rhythm of such sayings while meaning very little, or something actively contradictory. The line works as both a linguistic joke and a gentle satire of the impulse to find a moral in everything.

About the author

The Duchess is a minor but memorable character in Carroll's first Alice novel. She is loud, aggressive, and prone to drawing absurd morals from every situation, which makes her a comic vehicle for Carroll's satire of preachy adult wisdom. Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson, a nineteenth-century English writer, mathematician, and lecturer whose Alice books became foundational texts of literary nonsense and have remained in print continuously since their first publication.