How to push items to the top or bottom of the list in alphabetically sorted lists?

This question is not related to any specific scenario, platform or product, and it's more of an end-user UX rather than a design of UX. It applies to various use cases and platforms. One specific example which prompted me to ask this question is the notebooks list in Evernote - I'd like to push my notebook called "Archives" to the bottom of the list - it's right at the top otherwise. Another cases are naming the files and folders on a computer.

There are certain lists which are sorted alphabetically and there's no way to re-arrange them. In general, this is quite practical as it makes it easier to find the items when there are plenty of them and there's no need to arrange them manually.

However, sometimes you want to push certain items on the list to the top or to the bottom. And the only way to do that is to prefix the item with a certain symbol.

So:

• For pulling items to the top, the most common I've used is !, so your Requirements item becomes ! Requirements. Other nice options are ~ or -.
• For pushing to the bottom however, one obvious symbol is "z", so if the item is named Archives, you name it zzz-Archives or zzz Archives.

While the exclamation mark and other non-alpha symbols seem OK, I find zzz knocks off the visual "tidiness" of a list.

I am wondering if anyone used or seen more elegant solutions to pushing and pulling?