Ripe with Opportunity? Or Rife?

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).

My first thought was that rife with opportunity was gibberish, but it turns out to be at least as common as the ripe version I'm familiar with. I'm a Brit, and NGram seems to imply both forms are predominantly US usage, but the version I know seems commonplace enough to me. Here's the combined US/UK usage chart over the past 50 years from NGram (UK usage is so low it doesn't graph at all if I restrict to just that).

Calithumpian has unearthed an 'original?' instance in a translation made 1834, but this clearly didn't catch on for a long time. I believe this is because many would feel the same as me that rife sits uneasily with something 'positive'. Both forms seem to have started appearing more frequently in the late 1800s. Initially with a tendency for rife to be used referring to opportunities for crime and other negatives, and ripe to be associated with fields.

By the early 1900s it seems to me there are two distinct expressions doing the rounds, with any given speaker presumably massively preferring the one he's familiar with. Both expressions are somewhat flawed grammatically and/or semantically; it makes little sense to me to suggest that only one is 'valid' or 'original, and that the other is simply 'wrong'.

To me, rife with opportunity is strange - I'm more familiar This dog is rife with fleas. Apparently others feel the same (there's only one instance of ripe with fleas in the whole of Google Books).

I do not feel that usage for either word is significantly affected by what I imagine are a tiny number of speakers who don't know what either/both words mean.

One reason I personally favour ripe is that I associate it with similar expressions such as ripe for [the] taking/plucking (and even plunder, since whenever that's said it's invariably 'positive' from the speakers viewpoint).

TL;DR: Both expressions really do exist, and in my opinion can be said to be 'valid'. Rife sounds odd to me, but obviously not to many others.

EDIT: As I write, this answer has +5/-4 votes, which is probably the most "polarised" answer I've ever seen on ELU. Perhaps that's to do with the UK/US usage split mentioned above ('rife' wasn't common in America until the early 1800s, and almost all earlier British usages are negative).

Strangely, although almost all online references give "negative" example usages for rife, the only one I can easily find that explicitly mentions this negative connotation is Google...

1. (esp. of something undesirable or harmful) Of common occurrence; widespread.