It’s been a great month if you’re a fan of boorish behavior.

From Serena Williams at the U.S. Open tennis championships (“If I could, I would take this [bleeping] ball and shove it down your [bleeping] throat and kill you!”) to Rep. Joe Wilson during a speech by President Barack Obama to a joint session of Congress (“You lie!”) to Kanye West on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards (“I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time”), rude, out-of-line behavior is rapidly moving from the occasional exception to more of a commonplace rule.

I’m not sure what’s driving all of this very public incivility, but now it even seems to be moving into workplace speech.

Here’s what I’m talking about: In Barcelona, Spain, a judge has ruled that “insulting your boss with one particularly foul obscenity is not grounds for dismissal,” according to an Associated Press story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The obscenity in question “translates as ‘son of a bitch’ and was used by a worker against his boss during a January 2008 money dispute in the northeastern city of Gerona. The worker, who also called his boss ‘crazy,’ was promptly fired,” the AP report says.

The worker lost his first court challenge but later won on appeal with the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia. “Without a doubt, both expressions (either calling the boss ‘crazy’ or an ‘SOB’) are insulting,” Judge Sara Maria Pose Vidal said in the ruling, a copy of which was obtained by the AP.

But she noted that when the man called his boss crazy, he had been on his way out of the office and the boss did not hear it. She also wrote that the “son of a bitch” remark “should be viewed in linguistic context.”

Here’s the part of the judge’s ruling that I love: “The social degradation of language has caused the expressions used by the plaintiff to become commonly used in certain settings, especially in arguments,” Pose Vidal wrote, calling the dismissal a disproportionate punishment.

In other words, the Spanish court said that the term “SOB” is common—so common (at least in Spain) that it has passed the point of being considered something that someone should get fired for.

The AP story didn’t say this, but it seems clear that calling your boss a “son of a bitch” is now considered protected workplace speech in Spain. How long before that ruling makes it across the pond and takes root here in America’s workplaces?

My guess, given the rise in so much boorish behavior, is that we’ll see it sooner than anyone cares to imagine.

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