The term cheto is used in several South American countries to refer to what is very expensive, elegant or distinguished. For example: “Last night we went to dinner at a very cool restaurant in the port area”, “I need cool clothes to go to the company’s New Year’s Eve party”, “I would like to spend the holidays in a hotel cheto, with all the comforts ”.
The notion of cheto is also used in a derogatory or aggressive sense to describe someone as a snob. Cheto, in this sense, is synonymous with posh: someone who adopts the vocabulary, manners or dress of the upper class to imply that he belongs to it: “Don’t pretend that you live in a borrowed house and not even you have a car ”, “ I don’t like that cheto ”, “ I went out for a few months with a cheto that I dreamed of living in Miami ”.
According to DigoPaul, chetos often wear designer clothes and follow foreign fashions. These are people who strive to appear a high standard of living, regardless of whether they have the necessary financial means to do so or not.
It is important to bear in mind that cheto is usually an adjective that one individual applies to another: that is, a person does not recognize himself as a cheta. In the denomination there is a criticism that is expressed to those who feel superior due to their social condition.
When someone uses the word “cheto” to describe or define another person, they make it clear that they do not like their way of seeing life, although this does not always mean that money and luxuries necessarily bother them; on the contrary, we often criticize those who have what we would like to have, precisely because their presence reminds us that we have not yet fulfilled all our wishes.
Anyway, being a cheto is much more than having large sums of money and luxurious properties; Those who receive this qualification tend to exhibit a poor intellectual level, in large part because they have not explored their capacities, unlike what entrepreneurs, scientists and artists do who earn fortunes through tireless work and innovative creations.
Precisely, the chetos are often called “false rich”, since they usually appear to have an economic level higher than they actually have and do not even get their money in a relevant way. Within this table we can distinguish the youngest, who rely on the wealth of their parents to attract the attention of their friends and schoolmates with their belongings and their trips, and the adults, who lead catalog lives to ensure that that no one can think for even a second that they don’t have enough money.
The “really rich”, therefore, are those people who have always had a lot of money and who do not need to show it off to their friends, or who get it after years and years of hard work and good decisions. Unlike the chetos, they have to take care of what they have achieved, because they tend to take greater risks; For example, far from simply having two late-model cars and parading through high-class gyms with shoes and clothes whose prices could pay rent to several families, some of them have shares in several international companies and invest a large part of their fortune in businesses that seem innovative to them, with which a bad move can mean ruin.
Finally, Cheto is the name of a town that is part of the Spanish municipality of Bierge, belonging to the province of Huesca (autonomous community of Aragon).
