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phrases - 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?



Answer



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.


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