@Brus,

I disagree. I do not believe an ellipsis is implied at all. If we compare your correction (A) with the original (amended) (B), the meanings are slightly different:

(A) "Attention to perfect grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax was required at all times."

To me, it would seem as though they (he or she, if you prefer) are to be aware of perfect grammar in others' writing. I think it has something to do with 'perfect' here. Amended, it would work seamlessly (contextually of course):

(A2) "Attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax was required at all times."

A prepositional phrase headed by 'by' would work wonders as well. Now, on to B.

(B) "Perfect grammar (w), spelling (x), punctuation (y) and syntax (z) were required at all times."

This easily means that wxyz were required of each individual. The ellipsis that you provided here blears, only minimally, the meaning because being attentive to perfect grammar and having perfect grammar are slightly different.

Admittedly, this may have taken a bit of a literalist view...

@AnWulf,

Yes, some of those silly rules are nothing but that. And people just accept it without asking why do we do it. I had a Creative Writing teacher in High School whom I was talking to about, if I remember exactly, parallelism for prepositional phrases that I had done in a Humanities Exam. I first said prepositions when I meant prepositional phrase. Then she responded with, more or less, "you can't 'strand' prepositions". I paused at that moment and thought about what she said, but shrugged it off.

As for the older authors, I would think that they would be writing for their audience, and most males, especially those of the higher echelons, knew Latin & Greek. I don't really mind stumbling on a new word, be it Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French, etc. Any word, so long as it serves a purpose, is welcome in my vocabulary, or wordstock.

Just to throw my two cents in,

"Thus, the heroes of today are no longer living individuals but dead, and anonymous."

@Jayles

I don't think there is a connection between motive(s) and motivate(s) considering they fall within two different word groups (parts of speech). If there were a nominal Latin replacement of motive, then I you may be on to something.

I like both, but I would probably use brotherhood more than fraternity. This mainly because of my unfamiliarity with the word.

Edit: Sentences 3 through 5 should be removed because they are erroneous.

@T_reason

Your argument is, I believe, a non-sequitur. You state that x of y is correct plural (to take your example bags of flour), when the question asks for whether Legos, or Legoes(?), is an incorrect plural. But what about these kinds of things? Would you say that is wrong? It sounds pretty natural to me. Although pieces of Lego might be suitable substitution, I think the focus is on having a plural without a prepositional phrase, thus Legos/es.

Saying that "THERE IS NO SUCH WORD AS 'LEGOS'." is a particularly bad argument because words get added here and there, some that people, myself included, object to. But to further illustrate the absurdity of the statement, if Shakespeare had never added and created new words from other languages, most of our vocabulary, wordstock for those proponents of Anglish, and idioms would never have existed.

Besides, Legos is a very innocuous word.

Some of those changes are ghastly while others are reasonable considering the different audience. I cannot help but wonder however what has been lost in the soft translation.

As an American, I would have to say it is dialectical. I don't use it because I can't seem to use "tell about" without inserting an objective pronoun between the "tell" and "about". Additionally, tell seems to require an object, or else the sentence will be preempted by the question, "whom am I telling this to?" In the inquiry provided, I can't tell something to nothing/no one. But, perhaps, "tell about" has an ellipsis (me)->tell (me or context required accusative pronoun) about x. I reexamined your examples to see if that was the case, and I believe so.

Yes, I thought that it had been used because it was a factual statement but was not sure, and because I rarely see these types of sentences, I thought it would be best to have second opinion.