Ripe with Opportunity? Or Rife?

The Grammarist says I should use rife with rather than ripe with.

So far so good and I agree. But is there an exception for ripe with opportunity?

Googlefight overwhelmingly prefers ripe, and I like the imagery of an opportunity tree ripe with fruit.

Which is correct: ripe with opportunity or rife with opportunity?

The two words are actually unrelated.

Rife appears to be a native Old English word meaning "abundant" or "generous", though it is related to a similar Old Norse word.

Ripe on the other hand shares a common Old English ancestry with "reap", with Germanic roots.

Obviously the concepts of there being an abundance of something and something being ready to be reaped are related, but the imagery seems to work better for "rife with" than "ripe with". Consider:

1. "The region is rife with opportunities" = "There is an abundance of opportunities in the region."

2. "The region is ripe with opportunities" =(?) "The region is ready for a harvest of opportunities."

There are two reasons why I would prefer the first version. First, it has a better sense that there really are a lot of opportunities available, as distinct from only enough to be worth harvesting. Second, the second version requires me to think of the region as a thing that can ripen, something I wouldn't naturally do, and implies that I harvest not the ripe region itself, but the opportunities that are part of it. We would normally talk of the apples being ripe, not the apple tree.

So is it correct to say "ripe with"? If you regard the meaning of "ripe" as having drifted enough to acquire the meaning of "rife", then yes; usage trumps dictionaries. English is rife with possibilities; however I don't think this is a ripe one. Personally it smacks of laziness, so I'm resisting it.

Bryan Garner has this on rife vs. ripe:

While a tree may be rife (=abundant) with fruit, and that fruit may be ripe (=fully mature), the terms are unrelated. To confuse them is a surprisingly common malapropism—e.g.:

• ^{Iowa State . . . made an impression in Florida, ripe [read rife] with high school players coach Dan McCarney's staff would love to lure to Ames." Miller Bryce, "Worth Every Penny," Des Moines Register, 26 Aug. 2002, at C6}

• ^{"The movie is ripe [read rife] with fond allusions to earlier 007 flicks." David Germain, "Top Picks for Fall Films," Cincinnati Post, 26 Sept. 2002, at 14.}

• ^{"Exotic yet wholly approachable and ripe [read rife] with top-notch musicianship and infectious energy, this 'Revolution de Amor' is hard to resist." Scott D. Lewis, "CD of the Week," Oregonian (Portland), 30 Sept. 2002, at E1.}

^{Garners's Modern American Usage}

So it would appear that rife with opportunity is the correct phrase and ripe a common mistake*.

Google Books seems to support that rife with opportunity came first with this 1834 translation of an Italian poem:

Ripe with opportunities first appears in 1873, but the complete phrase was fields are ripe with opportunities, thus properly contextualizing the use of ripe.

*^{a mistake so common, perhaps a mishearing of rife, that dictionaries have since reported ripe with as acceptable?}

The grammarist wins; it's rife (in the "full of" sense) with opportunity.

Something that's rife with opportunity will have things that are ripe for the plucking, though.

[edit]

Both usages are perfectly grammatical, and one should avoid trying to promote grammatical rules based on the meanings of words (i.e. the "use rife for nasty things" thing) -- grammar should confine itself as much as possible to the function of the words, not their meaning.

So the answer to the OP's question is "Use the wording you prefer, because they're both good English, and they both make sense". There is certainly no room for "Thou Shalt..." statements

However, I find it quite depressing that tempers and rudeness come into play, when discussing word usage, particularly in cases like this where no-one is wrong.

Being rude to someone with a smile on your face is entertaining for all, but getting hot under the collar over such trivia wastes everyone's time.

I hope it doesn't happen often, here.

This is sort of a spoonerism between the sayings

1. when the moment is ripe - implying that the situation, if left alone for a bit, will "ripen" like a fruit.
2. X is rife with Y - meaning "X is very full of Y".

The way the phrase you provided is structured, rife would be the more correct word. However, were it me, I'd restructure it to use phrasing 1 above (and remove the spoonerism).

I would disagree with The Grammarist. Indeed, the only preposition used with rife is with, but ripe with is also an acceptable form. NOAD defines both adjectives thus:

rife with full of

ripe with full of

As you can see, they are exact synonyms and can thus be used interchangeably.

Rife with opportunity is not ungrammatical, but the common idiomatic expression, however, is ripe with opportunity.