Hoast n., v. a cough, to cough

The Scots language excels in providing onomatopoeic words for winter ailments. Just saying “hoast oot yer craig” has the desired effect of clearing the throat. Sheena Blackhall’s words in The Bonsai Grower (1988) need no translation: “fowk snochered and pyochered an hoastit inno their snifter-dichters”. Fortunately, if you have a craichly hoist, you might cure it with an infusion of hostin girse or Iceland moss, Cetraria islandica, described by J. Nicolson in Shetland Incidents and Tales (1931) as “an infallible remedy for severe coughs and troubles of the chest”. The kink-hoast, or whooping cough requires different measures. When this condition was common, mothers pushed children in prams round and round the gas works, exposed them to the fumes of boiling tar or, as A. Stewart recalls in Reminiscences of Dunfermline (1889), “The holding of a child over the mouth of a coal-pit was resorted to as a change of air for relieving ‘kingkost’”.
A hoast is not always a sign of illness. It can be used, the Dictionary of the Scots Language says, to attract attention or to cover embarrassment. D. MacLeod in Past Worthies of the Lennox (1894) asserts, “The Hoasting Club was a club of shop-keepers, who kept a sharp look-out for...terrible coughs...being the signal for their assembling in their favourite houff”. A hoast can also cause embarrassment, as it did for the sixteenth-century individual who “hostit at bayth the endis”, described in Christis Kirk on the Grene. William Dunbar ridicules Walter Kennedy in their Flyting (a1508) with the taunt, “Thy hostand hippis lattis nevir thy hos go dry”.
A more genteel figurative use of hoast is exemplified in J. M. Wilson's Historical, Traditionary and Imaginative Tales of the Borders (1857): “The case is no guid in law. It wadna stan a hoast in the Court o' Session”.