I meant for this to be a humorfic, but as usually happens (and as happened with Harry Potter and the Pathetic Excuse for a Wizard), some serious/angst/drama snuck in anyway. So this isn't nearly as gratuitously stupid as I planned it to be, but it's pretty pointless anyway.
Why Voldemort Hates To Be Called Voldie. Rated PG for ... well, nothing interesting, really.
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When Tom Riddle was eight years old, Miss Clavier, the grouchy spinster head of the Muggle orphanage where he lived, acquired the perfect cat. It was a grouchy spinster cat that had never borne any litters, despite having some purebred Persian blood somewhere far back in its pedigree. In fact, it fit Miss Clavier's personality quite well, even looking a bit like her, except that its fur was a constant black hairball instead of the frosted gray poof that Miss Clavier preferred. It liked to spit, hiss, lash, claw, and catapult at students just as much, if not more, as its owner did, and Miss Clavier was so proud of her little protégé that she called him Voldie (or sometimes Voldie-ootie-patootie), short for Voldemort.
Tom hated that cat, as did most of the other boys and girls at the orphanage. He didn't necessarily mind its grouchy, slink-backed personality, since he was often feeling rather grouchy himself. What he didn't like was the way it seemed to delight in sinking its venomous little fangs into his ankle every time he walked past. In fact, it seemed to harbor special hatred for certain people. Tiggy Tuttle often found large piles of shed black fur all over her white school blouses. Arkie Banks usually showed up at breakfast with claw marks running from his elbow to his wrist or, in cold weather, sometimes across his neck.
Worse still was the way the other boys, the taller ones, the older ones, whose no-good filthy Muggle parents had died or deserted them, looked one day at Voldie's static-filled fur and Tom's dark hair that never really seemed to lie flat on his head and laughed and pointed and laughed some more. "Voldie!" they shouted, still laughing. "It's Miss Clavier's little Voldie-ootie-patootie, dear little black puffball, look at him!"
And then there were the names. Moldy Voldie. Vold the Old Cold Mold. Every time Tom got in a fight and beat up someone, leaving the other boy (or girl) a mass of bruises and blood with strength he didn't actually know he had, someone went and reported it to Miss Clavier, and the giggles around the breakfast table the next morning would hum, "Guess who toldie on Voldie?" Tom would sit, scowling, his legs or back or rear still smarting from the switch.
He was immeasurably relieved to escape to Hogwarts at age 11, to leave the orphanage behind for the majority of the year. Only after paging through a wizarding baby name book, which actually contained names like Calamaria and Tamora and Marvolo instead of Esther and Jedediah and Horace, did he stumble upon the meaning of the cat Voldie's real name and discover, to his surprise, that he liked it. In a way he felt sorry for the poor animal, its noble name reduced to a two-syllable diminutive that rhymed with "moldy".
Later, when he became known as Voldemort to his friends, he insisted on being addressed as "Lord," to increase the power and strength of the grouchy cat's name. And Lord Voldemort was proud, and smug, of the fact that he inspired just as much fear in Muggles and wizards alike as the stupid black cat did in his eight-year-old self. But even so, he never, ever let anyone call him Voldie.
finis (I bet you're glad, aren't you?)