The Whatever Case Situation

"A lo mejor..." said Joan and stopped, looking at me inquisitively.
"How do you say that?" he asked. (Joan is a man's name, the Catalan version of Juan.)
It translates literally as "at best" but that's not what it means. These instances are called false friends, where two seemingly identical words or expressions mean different things in different languages. My favourite is constipado which means congested, resulting in a ridiculous number of times every winter that my students inform me with bleary eyes about their terrible constipation. A lo mejor simply means maybe.  I figured this out years ago when a roommate once answered a question of mine with "A lo mejor si, a lo mejor no," giving me no clue as to which was actually the preferred outcome.
I gave my students the explanation and the story of my discovery of it. Anna thought it was hilarious, saying it showed cultural differences, with the Spanish unwilling to commit to an actual statement. This echoes something that the language and culture geek in me has been fascinated by since my arrival. What do linguistic choices say about the culture that made them? When like and love are the same word in French, and want and love are the same word in Spanish, does this reflect their view of what love actually is?
Perhaps (a lo mejor) the most extreme example of this is the Spanish use of impersonal verb forms. Se ha roto means it broke itself. You never break anything. If you want to admit your involvement in the events that led to the item in question's current state, you say Se me ha roto, or It broke itself to me, making you the victim of the item's nefarious breakage agenda. Likewise, should gravity snatch it from your noble paws, Se me ha caido. (It fell itself to me.) Never do you drop anything.
Sure, in English, it fell or it broke absolve you of the blame, but Se me ha olvidado? It forgot itself to me. I think when you report this situation as a memory escaping from your brain of its own volition, we can safely say that the Spanish have removed all notions of personal responsibility from the language.
This goes a long way to explaining the politics of this country. They are not necessarily more corrupt than other countries where those in power continually game the system to their own advantage, but consequences here are different. SPOILER ALERT: there are none.
This week's outrage is courtesy of the ruling right wing Popular Party (PP). It was revealed that the former treasurer, forced out due to a previous corruption investigation, had squirrelled away 22 million euros in a Swiss bank account. Maybe (a lo mejor) I'm being idealistic, but I think that in other Western democracies (with the likely exception of Italy) when the guy in charge of the country's money is found to be taking that money for himself, hiding it with the keepers of Nazi gold and using it for illegal payoffs to his own party members and South American politicians for land acquisition deals, that government would be out of power by the end of the week. Here, the government sent threatening messages to the TV station reporting it and promised an internal audit. My math skills are weak, and my accounting knowledge nil, but I'm pretty sure that money circulating under the table won't show up in the ledgers being audited, since the money was UNDER THE TABLE in the first place.  However, the PP seems to feel it has done enough to address the situation and got back to the important business of running the country by introducing a law that says being a convicted felon is not a legal impediment to running a bank.
Spain has a national inferiority complex vis-a-vis the western world (mostly due to the racist shame of having been ruled by Arabs for centuries) and when their institutions act this way, I want to pat them on the head and give them an E for effort.
They might (a lo mejor) want to look into it.