Voldemort addressing Pettigrew as "Wormtail"

[abigailnus]

No: HPFGUIDX 54290

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "stickbook41" <stix4141 at h...> wrote:
> Does anyone know why Voldemort addresses Peter Pettigrew 
> as "Wormtail"?  This struck me as odd since "Wormtail" was the 
> nickname his school friends gave him. 

I remember that this question was raised a while back, and someone, I'm not sure who, suggested a possibility I really liked.  They posited that Wormtail was Peter's code name while he was Voldemort's spy - we know he did this for a year before the Potters' deaths and Voldemort's fall.  This was a valuable commodity for Voldy - a spy directly placed in Dumbledore's inner circle - so he wouldn't have been eager to share information about him.  The nickname simply stuck.  The fact that Peter is constantly referred to as Wormtail was used to explain quite a few things.  For example, it was suggested that Snape was aware of a spy around the Potters named Wormtail, but that he was unable to discover the spy's true name, and later assumed that Wormtail was Sirius.  This would also explain his reaction to seeing the names on the Maurauder's Map, and it would go a long way towards explaining why, in 12 years, no one thought it was odd that the DEs in Azkaban were cursing Peter's name.  They were talking about Wormtail, and only Sirius was in a position to know who that was.

Abigail