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
Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (1997) has this assessment of piggy bank:
Early Google Books matches for 'piggy bank'
The earliest Google Books match for "piggy bank" is Dairy Stephenson, "For Auld Lang Syne," in The Christian Register (August 5, 1920):
The second is Katherine von der Lin, The Way of the World (1921):
But the next are from 1941, when a whole swarm of matches appear in the search results. I should note an oddity: The Traveller's Malay Pronouncing Hand-book eleventh edition (1917, the first edition evidently was published in 1886) has the following untranslated Malay phrases:
But elsewhere the handbook notes that piggy (or pergi) can mean "go away," so these instances of "piggy Bank" are presumably just coincidental.
The 'Pete Pig Bank'
On significant antecedent of "piggy bank" may have been the "Pete" pig bank—a charity movement for the relief of lepers in the 1910s. From "For the Soldier Leper and Others," in The Continent (March 20, 1919):
You can see an advertisement for a "Pete Pig Bank" in the July 1917 issue of The Nurse: A Journal of Practical Knowledge.
Earlier matches for 'pig bank'
However, pig bank goes back significantly farther than the Pete Pig Bank movement. From Sophie Swett, "The Twins' Seventy-five Cents," in Primary Education (1904):
A note in Good Housekeeping (April 1904) suggests that "pig bank" and "piggy" were sometimes used interchangeably even then:
The later arrival of 'capitalist pig'
I also ran a Google Books search for "capitalist pig" to see whether that term might have influenced "pig bank," but the first two quotations are from the 1920s. From The Plebs (1923) [snippet view]:
And from European Economic and Political Survey (1925), quoting Nikolai Bukharin: