Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s old post on Facebook appears to have gone viral in the Philippines lately, over the usage of the term “bilat” in his caption.
On 5 Sep 2016, PM Lee posted a photo of him with Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the G20 Summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.
He wrote in the caption: “Happy to meet Canadian PM Justin Trudeau for our first ‘bilat’ meeting. We have good relations with Canada and can do much more together.”
It appears that the post has recently made its rounds on Facebook with 8k shares and 23k likes at the time of writing, and it suddenly garnered a bunch of comments from the Filipino netizens.
But their comments were not about the meeting per se. Apparently, the term “bilat” has a different meaning in Filipino.
While it is obvious that PM Lee was referring to a “bilateral meeting”, which means a diplomatic meeting between parties representing two countries.
In Filipino, the term “bilat” refers to the female genitalia vagina, according to Wiktionary.
