I don't believe the general use of this expression comes from the golf use - which would explain the discrepancy - though the two are closely related.
The word par has many definitions, including average or normal amount and usual/accepted standard.
Therefore something below par is below average, or below the acceptable standard - hence the usual, negative, meaning of the phrase.
In golf a hole's par is the number of strokes considered average or standard to complete it, and being under par means using fewer strokes than average - which happens to be a good thing, because of how the game works.
Can't help you with the origin of the phrase, but I suggest a more accurate rhetorical term for the phrase is MERISM.
Think of a merism as the counterpart to synecdoche, since both figures of speech concern parts and wholes. Synecdoche can be a
part to whole substitution, as in "All hands on deck!" When the ship captain gives that order, he doesn't expect a bunch of severed hands to show up on deck. "Hands," therefore, is a part to the whole, the substitution of a body part for the whole body. In like fashion, when someone requests that you "count noses," they're asking you to take attendance, not to literally count proboscises! The nose--a part--is a substitute for the whole person.
whole to a part substitution, as in "In my rearview mirror I could see the law as he approached my stopped car, and I could tell he was going to give me a speeding ticket." Here we have the whole, in this case "the law," substituting for the part; namely, a cop, or a state trooper, or an officer of the law.
Merism, on the other hand, expresses
- a totality--the whole--through contrasting parts, as in "The competition was open to all comers, both young and old and everyone in-between." Or, "Then the LORD God said, 'Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil' . . ." (Genesis 3:22a). Or, "She packed up all her possessions in record time: lock, stock, and barrel," meaning all, total, everything. (That merism may have had its genesis in the letters of Sir Walter Scott in, circa 1817.)
Merisms frequently figure in the writing of lawyers, and are a hallmark of legal style. The two parts of the legal merism "Last Will and Testament" at one time referred to two documents, enforced in two separate courts: the will disposed of a decedent's real property while the testament disposed of chattels. It became customary to combine the instruments in a single dispositive document, and the name has continued long after the doctrines that required its use became obsolete in common law.
A lawyer who writes a will typically includes a residuary clause that disposes of any property not covered by a prior section. The weight of tradition is such that the lawyer writing such a document will often phrase it something like this:
"I bequeath, convey, and devise the rest, residue, and remainder of
my property, real or personal, and wheresoever it may be situated, to Sally Jones, of 456 Elm Street, Hanover, Massachusetts."
While the inclusion of merisms in a legal document might give the people who are paying the lawyer $400 an hour the feeling they're getting their money's worth, it does virtually nothing to make a given writing (or document) somehow "more legal"! Merisms also tend to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, a writing.
Some merisms were introduced during the period when Norman French words were being absorbed into English. In order to assure that a document was clear to both Normans and Saxons, it was desirable to use both the Saxon-root and French-root synonyms for important words, to avoid a pretext for someone to claim a misunderstanding.
Perhaps researching your "way, shape, or form" as a merism might go a long way toward finding out who was the first person to use the expression.
In conclusion, I did come across a modern use of your expression from Stefan Constantinescu's website IntoMobile, from Friday, November 27th, 2009.
"Walter Cronkite, the man, is in no way, shape, or form similar to Twitter, the medium"
Best wishes, and happy hunting!
Best Answer
It appears that the original phrase was to "send good money after bad," rather than to "spend." The hope of recovering a bad debt by loaning more money to the debtor would fit the expression well, as would the vain hope of spending money on an old car or house to recover its value. "Sending money" to recover lost money would easily morph into "spending money" with much the same meaning. The bad, as some have said here, is lost. The good is in hand and ought not be wasted.
"Giovanni Torriano wrote and published a number of books on proverbs, including “New and Easie Directions for Attaining the Thuscan Italian Tongue” in 1639, “The Most Significant Select Italian Proverbs” in 1642, “A dictionary Italian and English, formerly compiled by John Florio, now diligently revised” in 1659, and “Piazza universale di proverbi italiani: Or A Common Place Of Italian Proverbes and Proverbial Phrases” in 1666, among other tomes. However, it was in his book “Italian Proverbial Phrases” published in 1662 that he wrote: The English say, To send good Mony after bad, to lose the Substance, for the Shaddow."
https://idiomation.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/good-money-after-bad/