What should our tour's question and answers look like?

Question

The tour of our site is relatively high-traffic page for newcomers, and one of the ways we can optimize it is by choosing the question and answers that appear on it. However, there are very strict limitations on what can appear – in fact, only one question on this entire site is currently eligible.

See What determines the questions available for selection in the tour page? for details on these criteria and this SEDE query for eligible and almost eligible questions on our site, but the most important points are an upvoted question with at least two upvoted answers, and all three having fewer than 400 characters each and no special formatting.

The question we are currently using isn't great for a few reasons, perhaps most crucially because it is a popular question that is frequently modified and thus can be made suddenly ineligible for the tour. A more stable solution is to artificially set up a question and answers and then lock it once it meets the criteria.

So this is your opportunity to make suggestions regarding the content that should appear in the tour. Feel free to invent something completely new, or to cut down an existing question/answer.

We'll then conscript a few users and coordinate the asking, answering, and voting of the highest-voted suggestion, and once it's in place, a moderator will lock the post so that we have a nice-looking tour in perpetuity.

All that said – please post suggestions here with one set per answer. We need a:

# Question title

Question body

[tags]

* Good answer one

* Good answer two

To reiterate: The question and answer bodies need to each be 400 characters or less (which is counted according to the generated HTML, probably also including the surrounding <p><p/>) and may not contain any special block level formatting such as headers, block-quotes, or lists.

Answer 1

Why is there a Q in SPQR?

The abbreviation SPQR stands for Senatus PopulusQue Romanus. Why is the Q included, as there are only three words? Why isn't it just SPR? Or does SPQR stand for something else?

abbreviations conjunction

• The enclitic -que was treated much like a word. This is most evident in the way Ovid handles quotes, where -que is outside a quote but the word it's attached to is inside. There are few other ancient abbreviations with -que, if any, so it's difficult to compare.

  • Comment to this answer: For a concrete example, consider Metamorphoses V.414: "adgnovitque deam 'ne' c 'longius ibitis!' inquit" which uses -c instead of -que.

• We definitely know that SPQR refers to senatus populusque Romanus and not something else. This text is inscribed in full in the temple of Saturn and arch of Titus in Rome. It's hard to say whether the abbreviation is systematic or an arbitrary choice that happened to stick.