A word I'll avoid with a cop in Spain

In 1988 I visited a family in Madrid, Spain whose teen-age son had spent some time the previous year living in our home in the Baltimore area as an international exchange student. His family had several times invited my wife and me to visit them, so after finishing a business trip in London, I took them up on their invitation and hopped over to Madrid.

The boy’s father took him and me for a spin around the city in his car. As we approached the Puerta del Sol (Madrid’s equivalent of New York’s Times Square), a traffic cop gave a rather ambiguous signal to the driver, upon which he turned off to the right; immediately, the cop blew his whistle and waved him back. My frustrated host shouted a word at the cop which I for a brief second thought might land us in jail. The word I had only known as a Spanish slang term for a part of the female anatomy.

Luckily, the cop was unruffled and waved us on straight ahead; I imagine that, had this happened during the Franco regime, we might have all been hauled off to jail. Afterward I consulted my Spanish-Spanish dictionary and found that two definitions of the word were provided: the first was the slang term with which I was familiar, but the second was an "exclamation of anger, amazement, annoyance, admiration, etc." (my translation from the original Spanish).

I have driven in Spain but never had any confrontation with a cop. If such should happen in the future, I don’t think I’ll use my host’s word but, rather, something less daring.