The Initials ‘CEO’ Now Have An Entirely New Meaning

Presenting a number of new, perhaps more accurate replacements for the meaning of the common CEO acronym

At one time in our no-so-distant past the term ‘CEO,’ meaning ‘Chief Executive Officer,’ was invented to replace the perfectly good word ‘President’ as the title for the person heading up a company or corporation.

Goldman CEO Gerald Corrigan
One-time Goldman Sachs CEO Gerald Corrigan testifying before Congress about how much he liked the "little people."

For some reason, some bureaucratic gerbils somewhere decided that acronyms were better than names for describing institutions, treaties, corporations and other entities of importance, because it made them sound cooler and more authoritative. Unfortunately, it also made them harder to remember, and a person today has to carry around a special dictionary of everyday acronyms to even understand what a person is saying.

There is a song from the rock opera ‘Hair’ that in the 1960’s already recognized this dread literary disease called ‘Initials’: “LBJ took the IRT down to 4th Street USA. When he got there what did he see? The youth of America on LSD!” That was almost the entire song. You can see why it didn’t make it to the top 40.

The financial upheavals of the last decade have exposed CEO’s as tending to be a Caesar-like bunch of extremely greedy, unpatriotic selfish hogs who have no social conscience and no limits as to their self-indulgence — even at the expense of the very companies they are running. The term ‘CEO’ has changed in meaning to something of a negative image, much the same as what has happened to once proud names like Enron, AIG, Watergate, Halliburton, Walmart and George Bush. It is apparent that the meaning of  the term for ‘Chief Executive Officer’ must be altered to reflect the changing times.

Here are a number of possibilities for the new meaning of ‘CEO’:

Craven Eunich Ogre; Cannibalistic Evil Oppressor; Creep Eviscerating the Organization; Cutthroat Enslaving Oaf; Chieftain Endlessly Overstuffed; Class-conscious Economic Outlaw; Cretin Extremely Overpaid; Contemptible Emasculating Oaf; Capitalist Engorging Opulence; Copiously Excreting Ooze; Con-artist Expounding Obscenely; Conducting Economics Offshore; Cabalistic Extorting Oldie; Controlling Eagerly Organization; Cadaverous Emetic Orifice; Cantankerous, Envious and Obdurate.

There are also many other, more colorful and obscene, yet accurately descriptive words, that we cannot print here.

Roger Freed
Share
Share