Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
suffer (v.)
The intransitive verb (He suffers mostly at night) affords no real difficulty, but an older transitive sense, meaning “permit” or “allow,” as in Suffer the little children to come unto me, is still around, although we seem to keep it mainly in the sense of “to endure”: He will not suffer contradiction. We also preserve something of that sense in the adjective insufferable, which means “unendurable,” “impermissible.”
Another question of usage is whether suffer should ever be followed by with, rather than the usual from: I suffer frequently from [with] migraines. Apparently with is used only in Informal and Casual situations; Edited English uses from almost exclusively.
