Useful German Words That English Is Missing

I agree with all those words. I like 'em all, particularly "doch". It's an elegant way around questions like you describe. (Similarly, I tend to respond to things like "So you don't have any spare liver flukes?" with "correct" so's not to be ambiguous.)

I like little linguistic logic traps, like the famous "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" to which the answers "yes" and "no" are both rather awful. The best one-word response to that question is "mu", a word that certain old-school geeks use in a pseudo-Buddhist sense to mean "I can't answer that question because it contains invalid assumptions". So that's a word I'd like to see adopted into wider English useage.

The great thing about English is that we're shameless about stealing words we like from anywhere we see them: witness "schadenfreude", which we strip of its capital letter, and "esprit d'escalier". The words we steal and incorporate at different times are a little glimpse into history - for example, all the words we stole from Hindi while we sat on our fat imperial bums all over that subcontinent. Magpies represent!