[dmwzhjdx] English punctuation

ASCII has 32 punctuation characters.  Perhaps useful for an encoding of binary that looks like line noise.

`-=[]\;' ,./~!@#$%^&*()_+ {}|:"<>?

Pessimistically, we can look at Unicode and mourn the thwartage of communication and ideas imposed by the lack of certain punctuation (Sapir-Whorf).  The irony mark and the interrobang come to mind.

Optimistically, we can say we got more punctuation than we really needed, including weird characters like @ and ^.  Here, in my opinion, are the 12 essential punctuation marks for English:

-;',./!*():?

Notably omitting double quotes, which can be written as two single quotes, and the dollar sign which can be written USD.

Including the asterisk, needed for section breaks and bullet points, functionally important for organizing text.

Plus space, newline, escape.  26+12+3=41.  Plus 10 if digits.