[lkirkwood]

It's true that in the case of a sorting algorithm it's not immediately obvious how to analyse the time complexity with Big O. However, I feel that you may be getting bogged down in semantics.

Perhaps it is accurate to say that when Big O is used to describe the time complexity of a function in computer science the variable n in O(f(n)) usually describes the size of the input, which may not be common knowledge. But if the question is:

> Have programmers redefined O to specifically mean worst case?

Then in general I would say no. I suppose to answer more concretely I would have to ask: "Which programmers?"