> but I thought the everyday meaning of "sorting" was ordering, not categorizingI think I've always thought of ordering as a subset of sorting, not something different, both in computing and in "real life" language use.
When sorting washed laundry I categorise by type and order by a fairly arbitrary mix of target position (undies in the top left draw, socks top right, daily t-shirts the draw below, "better" t-shirts the draw below that, then trousers, ...), hue/pattern/subject, and a few other properties. As with your cards example there are both grouping and ordering operations present in the sorting operation (in the cards example there might be two orderings: one for the suits if you want them to be in a specific order and one by the value of the cards within the suit).
Sorting numbers in a computer seem quite different: each category has at most one item and the are ordered by the same property they are categorised by, but the process is similar enough.
And sorting in computing is not always simply ordering. There are many examples where it is categorising (just by some variety of ordinal value). Some sorting algorithms explicitly categorise the input data as a divide-and-conquer process. Sometimes you don't care about the precise ordering (but it is done precisely anyway because a fuzzy sort would be no more performant).
The only examples that immediately jumps to mind where there is a definite distinction made are data management languages where there is a distinction between ordering and grouping (quite explicitly seen in SQL's "order by" and "group by" clauses), and even there I know that internally ordering/grouping/both are performed by what I would identify as a sort operation.
Sorting doesn't mean something different in computing really, people just tend to pick out a more specific definition in that context.