Edgar was the name given to me. Bong was the name of home. Legs was the name of belonging. Ned was the name I chose, and the life I built around it.
You can usually tell which part of my life you belong to by what you call me.
If you call me Edgar, you probably knew me in elementary school, or you’re reading my name off an official document. If you call me Bong, you’re most likely family, a relative, someone from our old subdivision, or someone from church. If you call me Legs, chances are we went to high school together. And if you call me Ned, you belong to almost everything that came after.
Edgar, Bong, Legs, Ned. They’re not just different labels for the same person. Each one carries a specific time, a specific place, and a specific version of who I was when people used it. Put them together and you basically get a map of my life.
Edgar: The Name Given to Me
My legal name is Edgar. I was named after Edgar Mortiz, a well-known Filipino actor and singer who was a major teen star the year I was born, 1971.
For the first several years of my life, Edgar was what people called me outside our home, attendance in elementary school, report cards, certificates, anything that needed my official identity on it. After elementary school though, it slowly disappeared from everyday conversation. These days almost nobody calls me Edgar unless they’re reading it off a form, checking my ID, or knew me from a very early chapter of my life. When someone calls out “Edgar” in a waiting room, it genuinely takes me a second to register that they mean me.
Edgar is legally still mine. It just isn’t really the name I recognize myself by anymore.
Bong: The Name of Home
At home I was Bong. My mother told me she named me after Bongbong Marcos, son of the Philippine president at the time, who many years later would become president of the Philippines himself and get called PBBM. But inside our family the name never felt political. Bong just meant me. It’s what my parents called when food was ready, what relatives used at gatherings, how people in our subdivision (the residential neighborhood we lived in) and church knew me.
Even now, when someone calls me Bong, I immediately know something about how we’re connected. It’s familiarity. It belongs to people who knew me before the résumé, before any titles, before the book and the talks and the website, before I had accomplished anything that needed explaining. Bong is the name of home. It carries childhood, family, faith, and the feeling of being known without having to introduce yourself.
Legs: The Name of Belonging
When I got to Marist School, a Catholic all-boys school in Metro Manila, I walked into a different naming culture entirely. and students mostly called each other by surname, usually shortened into something you could shout across a corridor or a basketball court. Legaspi became Legs.
I’m sure other Legaspis somewhere got called that too, but in our batch, I was Legs. Nobody’s parent picked that name, nobody wrote it on a document. It just came out of the group, the way most school nicknames do. Someone uses it once, other people repeat it, and eventually it’s just part of the shared vocabulary. Legs belonged to adolescence, to barkada (the Filipino word for your close circle of friends), jokes, awkwardness, figuring out where I fit among peers. When someone calls me Legs today, I already know which door into my past just opened, and I’m bracing myself for an old classmate and an embarrassing story, probably both.
The Day I Found Ned
Sometime during high school I came across a book in the library called The Book of Names. Naturally I looked up Edgar. The entry said Edgar had a diminutive, Ned, and associated the name with riches and prosperity. I remember thinking, that sounds promising, maybe calling myself that would turn into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wasn’t making some deep statement about identity at that age. I just liked the name. Short, distinctive, and it came with a meaning I wanted to claim for myself.
I had already decided that when I got to college, I would introduce myself as Ned.
The Name I Chose
I’ve been going by Ned for thirty-eight years now. What started as a teenager’s experiment eventually became the name attached to nearly my entire adult life.
When I transferred to the University of the Philippines, the country’s national university, I stayed in communication, the field I had found instead of the pre-med track my mother had originally hoped I would take. I built a thirty-year career in international media, became an executive and creative leader, and for a long stretch was known as Sir Ned. In many Philippine workplaces, “Sir” and “Ma’am” are commonly used as respectful forms of address, especially for supervisors, teachers, and senior colleagues.
After I retired, I lost the professional identity I had spent decades building and had to figure out who I was without the company and the title that had defined me for so long. I went back to school. I became a Cultural Intelligence Fellow, joining an international community that applies cultural intelligence to different professional fields. I wrote a book, started teaching, and found myself speaking in classrooms, conference halls, hospitals, and embassies about culture and connection. Today, I am an author, educator, and speaker.
Maybe the prophecy did fulfill itself, just not exactly the way I pictured it as a teenager flipping through a library book. The riches weren’t only financial. They came as stories, people, places, lessons, and relationships. Prosperity turned out to mean getting to build something meaningful out of everything I’d lived and learned.
We Carry More Than One Self
People sometimes talk about identity like there has to be one true, authentic version of you hiding underneath all the others. I don’t really see Edgar, Bong, Legs, and Ned that way. None of them is fake, they each just came out of a particular relationship and a particular world. Edgar belongs to law and school records and the identity I was first given. Bong belongs to family and home and faith. Legs belongs to friendship and adolescence and one specific school culture. Ned belongs to adulthood, choice, and the public life I eventually built.
We don’t become totally different people just because different groups call us different things. But different relationships do reveal different sides of us. Some people know your childhood self. Others remember you before you had any confidence. Some knew you when you were still trying to figure out where you belonged, and others only met you after you’d already learned how to tell your own story. A name can work like a key. It gives someone access to a particular room in your life.
Filipinos Rarely Leave a Name Alone
Filipinos have a genuinely playful relationship with names. We shorten them, stretch them, repeat syllables, mash them together, tack on unexpected endings, and end up with variations that only really make sense inside one family or friend group or office.
Once people get comfortable with you, your name usually stops staying fixed. Ned alone has produced more variations than I can count at this point. There’s Neddy, softer and more affectionate. Nedsky, because adding -sky somehow makes any Filipino nickname sound more playful. There was Neddam, which showed up during the years Saddam Hussein was constantly in the news, not a political statement at all, just someone playing with the sounds of Ned and Saddam until it stuck for a while. There’s Nedina, inspired by Robina Gokongwei, a well-known Filipino-Chinese businesswoman, where the exact logic matters less than the joke and the sound of it. And there’s Nedgar, a mashup of Ned and Edgar, the name I chose fused with the name I was given.
Each version carries its own tone, some affectionate, some teasing, some belonging to just one person or one group and sounding strange coming from anyone else. That’s really the point. The freedom to play with someone’s name is usually a sign of familiarity. It says we know you well enough to call you something that has never once appeared on any official document. A nickname becomes a small proof of membership, showing who’s inside a relationship and who’s still standing outside it. The name may have started out as mine, but everyone around me has had a hand in reshaping it.
The Many Uses of Ned
Eventually I started playing with the name myself. There’s Ned Talks. Nedflix. Ned-ucation. Ned-ify. And now, apparently, the Ned-izens. After almost four decades I’ve clearly fully committed to the pun.
But there’s something sincere underneath the wordplay too. Ned has become the home for all the ideas, stories, and questions I now share publicly. It’s stopped being simply what people call me. It’s turned into a kind of language I use to introduce my work, invite people into conversation, and build a community around the things I actually care about.
What Names Reveal About Identity
Names feel deeply personal, but nobody actually creates their own identity alone. Other people name us before we ever get a say. Our parents give us a legal name and often a nickname. Schools decide how it appears in the records. Friends shorten it or twist it into something else. Workplaces attach a title. Audiences eventually attach it to a body of work.
Identity ends up being both personal and relational at the same time. We help shape who we become, but other people are constantly reflecting versions of ourselves back at us too. This shows up especially clearly in more relational cultures, where who you are can’t really be separated from whose child, sibling, classmate, or colleague you are. A name doesn’t just identify a person, it locates that person inside a whole network of relationships. That’s probably why hearing an old nickname can hit you emotionally. It’s not just the sound of the name, it’s remembering who used to say it, and who you were when they did.
Names as Culture, Communication, and Connection
Culture shapes how names get chosen, shortened, and understood. My legal name came from a famous figure the year I was born. My family nickname came from another well-known name in Philippine public life. My high school name came out of an all-boys school where surnames often turned into shorthand for belonging. The later Ned variations came straight out of Filipino humor and the habit of turning language into play. Even the fact that one person can carry a legal name, a family nickname, a school nickname, and a professional name says something about all the different communities that shaped that identity. A name is rarely ever just a label. It’s usually a small story about the world a person was born into.
Communication is what gives a name its emotional weight. The word itself can be short, but who says it, how, and where they first knew you can carry intimacy, hierarchy, affection, or distance. Edgar sounds official to me. Bong feels like home. Legs sounds like an old classmate about to remind me of something I’d hoped everyone had forgotten. Neddy sounds affectionate. Nedsky, Neddam, and Nedina sound like someone’s in a playful mood. Ned is how I meet the world now. The same name said by different people in different tones ends up meaning something different every time, a mother calling her child is not the same tenderness as a teacher reading a class list, and that’s not the same as a friend shouting a nickname across a hallway.
And then there’s connection, which shows up in which name someone chooses to use with you. When people call you by a particular name, they’re placing themselves inside your story, reminding you of the relationship you share and the version of you they’ve actually witnessed. That’s why an old nickname can pull you straight back into another time, a childhood name bringing back a house that no longer exists or parents who are no longer around, a school nickname reviving friendships and rivalries you thought you’d outgrown. Every name carries connection, simply because every name was spoken by someone who mattered.
Choosing Who We Will Become
Most of our earliest identities are just handed to us. We inherit a name, a family, a language, a religion, and a whole set of expectations before we’re old enough to choose any of it. As we get older we start negotiating with what we’ve inherited, keeping some parts, reinterpreting others, leaving a few behind altogether.
Choosing the name Ned was a small act at the time, but looking back I can see it carried something bigger. I wanted a hand in naming the person I was going to become. I didn’t want my identity decided entirely by what had already been assigned to me. That never meant rejecting the people who raised me and named me in the first place. Ned didn’t erase Edgar or Bong or Legs, he carried all of them forward, he just also represented possibility, a self that hadn’t fully existed yet. Sometimes reinvention really does start with something as small as introducing yourself differently.
When Ned Became Nedlegs
By the early 2000s, Yahoo had become one of the main gateways to the internet. When I created an email address and online username, I decided to combine the name I had chosen, Ned, with Legs, the nickname my classmates had given me in high school.
That was how Nedlegs was born. At first, it was simply a practical digital identity. But the name eventually came to mean more. Ned represented the person I had chosen to become. Legs carried the friendships, memories, and sense of belonging that came from my school years. Put together, Nedlegs was also me, not a separate persona, but a blend of two names that had shaped my life.
For years, I had imagined building a company that could extend the kind of content work I had done in international media and eventually grow into a knowledge enterprise of my own. Because the business would be shaped by my experience, ideas, and vision, the name felt right. I called it Nedlegs Incorporated.
Today, Nedlegs Incorporated is the Philippine corporation that owns and operates this website, nedlegaspi.com, and supports my work in publishing, education, speaking, learning programs, original frameworks, and related intellectual property.
A Promise to the Ned-izens
If you’re reading this, you probably belong to the part of my life that calls me Ned. Maybe you found me through the book, through teaching, through a talk, through this website or something I shared online. You may never call me Edgar or Bong or Legs. You may never get close enough for Neddy or Nedsky or Neddam or Nedina.
But through this space, I hope you get to know the lives and lessons carried by all those names anyway. And since we’re calling this growing community the Ned-izens, let me attach a promise to that name. I’ll try to make this a space worth coming back to. I’ll share not just what I’ve accomplished but what I’ve questioned, misunderstood, lost, and eventually relearned. I’ll try to turn experience into knowledge, knowledge into stories, and stories into chances for real connection. I won’t pretend to have every answer, but I’ll keep asking the questions that help us understand culture more deeply, communicate across differences more thoughtfully, and connect with each other more honestly.
Edgar was the name given to me. Bong was the name of home. Legs was the name of belonging. Ned was the name I chose. And Ned Legaspi is the name I now attach to the life, the work, and the community I’m still building.
So call me by the name I chose.
Welcome, Ned-izen.