@jacksalemi1 - And your point is?

Just to add to what jayles and dyske have said, this is what in EFL and ESL we call a mixed conditional. The first part "If I had studied" is like a 3rd conditional (unreal event in the past), and the second part, "I would have a good grade", is like a 2nd conditional (unreal event in the present). So there's an unfulfilled condition in the past leading to an unfulfilled result in the present. It's what I call a 3:2 mixed conditional. (Some grammarians refer to unreal as counterfactual, but it's too much of a mouthful for me!)

A pure second conditional would have both an unreal present (or future) condition and result: "If I studied hard, I would get a good grade"

We can also have the opposite: a 2:3 mixed conditional, where a present (or more likely general) condition has a past result. - "If I wasn't (or weren't for the purists) so lazy, I would have studied harder. (But I am lazy (by nature), so I didn't study).

I've written quite a full explanation of 3rd and mixed conditionals, with exercises and a discussion of the "wasn't/weren't" issue (for foreign learners) here : http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-on-condtionals-third-and-mixed.html

One last point regarding the original question - in "I would have a good grade", "have" is certainly possessive, but it's not an auxiliary: it's the main (or lexical verb). The auxiliary here is "would". On the other hand "have" (or rather "had") is an auxiliary in the first part, "If I had studied" and (together with "would") in the 3rd conditional result clause "I would have gotten a good grade", where "study" and "get" are the main (lexical) verbs, respectively.

@Levant - Although "there is a quick succession of ..." is the more common expression, a quick check with Google Books shows that there are quite a few examples from reputable publishers that include "there are a quick succession of ...". For example this is from the London Literary Gazette of 1831 - "then there are a succession of flats". The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2007) has "Again there are a succession of milestones", and here's one from the Oxford Companion to the American Musical (2008) - "there are a succession of specialty spots that pad out the thin storyline".

Just because we have "a" plus a singular noun it doesn't necessarily mean that we always have to use a singular verb. Indeed sometimes a plural verb is necessary - "There are a small number of questions still unanswered" or "There are a lot of different ways of seeing this.". The expressions "a number of" and "a lot of" are quantifiers, and I would argue that "a succession of" could be seen here in the same light. So I wouldn't be so quick to correct Jolie on this one. Actually, I wouldn't be so quick to correct somebody period, even if they really were wrong, which personally, I doubt if Jolie is.

Both Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage and the New Fowler's refer to "as per" as a compound preposition (like "as for" or apart from"), so whatever its faults, I don't think you can really call it ungrammatical. Nor does any redundancy make it ungrammatical. Redundancy is a style issue; it has nothing to do with grammar.

To go back to the original question, "as per usual" is an established idiom in British English, having been used by writers such as W.S.Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), James Joyce and Julian Barnes. I wouldn't say it's so much sarcastic as humorous. New Fowler's calls it slang, Oxford and Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionaries lists it as an informal idiom (along with "as per usual"), and Oxford Concise simply as a phrase. It may involve a bit of redundancy, but hey, life's too short to worry about redundancy in informal idiomatic speech.

I think we sometimes also shorten it to "as per" with the "usual" being understood. "He's late again!" As per!" - New Fowler's adds that 'humorous variants abound, e.g. "She knew better, didn't she? As per always" '

@annp - it is indeed what Fowler called the fused participle, but whether you use a possessive with it or not is purely a matter of formality. In object position, in informal language, object pronouns are fine.

@Hairy Scot - "chuffed" is in one of Merriam-Webster's lists of "Top ten British words". Your phrase "chuffed to the knickers" reminds me that playwright Harold Pinter was rather fond of the expression "chuffed to the bollocks", bollocks being another of M-W's favourites. The rest of this particular list were: wonky · cheese (as in "hard cheese, mate") · dogsbody · shirty · peckish · dodgy · shambolic · stroppy

http://www.merriam-webster.com/top-ten-lists/top-10-favorite-british-words-vol-1/prat.html

http://www.merriam-webster.com/top-ten-lists/top-10-favorite-british-words-vol-2/dodgy.html

@Zee - Just to complicate things, what we call "soda" in the UK is soda water, which I think you call club soda in the States. But according to Wikipedia "In many parts of the US, soda has come to mean any type of sweetened, carbonated soft drink." Which sounds rather like "pop" to me, and which is how Wikipedia also defines pop.

In Britain generally, Coke, Pepsi, Seven-up etc are referred to as fizzy drinks and sometimes as "pop" (American influence, I think), but in Glasgow they're often referred to as "ginger" (the presence or not of ginger is immaterial) and in Edinburgh as "juice", although they're certainly not what you or I would normally think of as juice. It's just all part of life's rich fabric. Are there are any other regional generic words for fizzy soft drinks, I wonder?

@AnWulf - Good on you for backing singular they. However the examples with verbs you then give are fine for American usage, but in British usage (which is what some people are complaining about here) would need to read:

team is/are
teams are

band is/are
bands are

government is/are
governments are

I think we Brits (and the British media) tend to use a plural verb with a singular group (or collective) noun more often than a singular verb. Because we normally think of them as groups of people rather than as entities.

@Henri - OK I misunderstood your argument. I thought you meant "may" for permission, but in fact you're talking about possibility. What I think you're really saying is "I might go, then on the other hand I might not go".

But I wouldn't say that that's a very common use of "can not" nor that it's the only possible meaning. We can use it when we want to stress the "not" for example. But Burchfield writing in the New Modern Fowler's suggest that it's also simply a matter of preference; he says he usually writes "can not" rather than "cannot" for example.

@Henri - do you have any evidence to back you up there. Every dictionary I've looked at has cannot =can not, without any qualification.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage has several examples of "cannot" meaning "may not", including one from the original language maven, William Safire, who used to write on English at the New York Times - "You can flout convention and flout authority, but you cannot use use flaunt for flout". At the time a correspondent complained to Safire that he should have said "may not", but MWDEU say "this usage is so clear and firmly established in writing on usage that it shouldn't be quibbled at"

There is no suggestion of this difference either in the original Fowle's or in the Third Edition.