Dear caradea: Nobody on the board has a command of rhetoric inferior to mine, but I keep trying to learn a bit. Your "stond" vs "strand" seems to ring a bell - I think I saw it in a poem, with Scottish dialect,rhyming with "hond" for "hand".
I like the example in the byu site - "A pun is its own reword"
As to Brit pronunciation, I leave that to some of our UK friends.