“Four
legs good, two legs bad.”
This phrase, which occurs in Chapter
III, constitutes Snowball’s condensation of the Seven Commandments
of Animalism, which themselves serve as abridgments of Old Major’s
stirring speech on the need for animal unity in the face of human
oppression. The phrase instances one of the novel’s many moments
of propagandizing, which Orwell portrays as one example of how the
elite class abuses language to control the lower classes. Although
the slogan seems to help the animals achieve their goal at first,
enabling them to clarify in their minds the principles that they
support, it soon becomes a meaningless sound bleated by the sheep
(“two legs baa-d”), serving no purpose other than to drown out dissenting
opinion. By the end of the novel, as the propagandistic needs of
the leadership change, the pigs alter the chant to the similar-sounding
but completely antithetical “Four legs good, two legs better.”
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