suffer

Often heard in the negative, as consolation: at least he didn't suffer means a death came without pain. That use is about felt pain, not circumstances, which is how it differs from the "hardship" meaning. Agonize and anguish lean toward mental torment, while the rarer thole stays close to the original idea of bearing.

Underneath every meaning lies a load being carried: Middle English suffren came through Anglo-Norman from Latin sufferre, sub- "under" plus ferō "I carry," and it displaced the native Old English þrōwian. Used without an object, it needs nothing named. Artists, businesses and refugees simply suffer. Add an object and it becomes the transitive "endure".

Give it an object and the bearing becomes explicit: you suffer insults, losses, criticism, even "two big bear markets," as The Economist put it in 2013. The object need not be painful. In William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a project that "may suffer alteration" simply undergoes change. Bear, dree and thole share this sense of carrying something through.

Here the subject is usually a thing rather than a person: school-work, timekeeping, crops, morale. The decline is typically the cost of something else, such as too much partying, or, in Trains Illustrated in 1961, the substitution of Class 5 locomotives after which "timekeeping had suffered." People suffer hardship; performance and quality suffer in this sense.