The latex distribution has \lefthyphenmin=-1 and \righthyphenmin=-1 . This causes bogus hyphenation of english text, such as suggest-s . Apparently the bug was in some old version of the babel system, and it was fixed some time ago. The latest babel macros on CTAN are correct.
I believe the hyphenation problems have been fixed in tetex-1.0.1 (which will be available in Raw Hide Friday 5pm). If I'm wrong, please reopen this bug.