The subject is special characters, especially "&", when they stand alone, preceded and followed by a space. Currently they are ignored for sorting. What we need is for special characters standing alone to sort as they do when they occur embedded in a string, that is, sort before letters. We would also expect that they would sort after 'space' or 'nothing', and before numbers (though that last is not important in our usage).

Examples:
Needed sort order: "B", "B & B", "B A".
(Current orderis: "B", "B A", "B & B".
From our database, in needed order:
Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad
Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad
This order is needed because it is intuitive for us and for our users.

We understand there may be other applications which need it as is. If that's the case, how about an option, perhaps in the "Specify sort order" window, an aditional "setting for this field", perhaps "Ignore special characters" (we'd set it to false).

You may be able to get the sort you desire by changing the field type to Code. Of course, then case would be significant in Term searches.