Executives' salaries used to be a sort of semi-secret, reluctantly whispered to stockholders in the fine print of an annual report and expected to be kept, like all family discussions of money, away from the eyes and ears of outsiders who might not understand.

But now, egged on by the increasingly prolific business media, salary- flexing is becoming a sort of annual rite of spring for corporate honchos. Like the salary-and-bonus contracts offered to top National Football League recruits, CEOs' salary-bonus-options packages are not only news but provocation.

What they are getting is enough to make state lottery pots look paltry. The nation's 25 best-paid executives all got more than $2.3 million in total compensation in 1984, with five of them comfortably over $5 million. The 259 major corporations included in a Business Week compilation paid their top managers an average of $653,000 last year. That was up an average of 12.7 percent from 1983, handsomely higher than the 4.3 percent rate of inflation and the 6.5 percent jump in white collar pay. And it was the second year of two-digit increases.