Learn English – Origin of the “breach” sense of “compromise”

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!

J.E. Lighter, The Random House Dictionary of American Slang (1994) reports that the origin of bitching in a positive sense was student use:

bitching adj., ... 2. Stu. excellent, wonderful, exceptionally attractive. Also, bitchen.

[First two cited occurrences:] 1957 Kohner Gidget 10: It was a bitchen day too. The sun was out...in Southern California. 1962 English Jrnl. (May) 323: Bitchin' equivalent to neat or swell.

The instance in Frederick Kohner, Gidget (1957) reads in context this way:

I tried it. I was sort of desperate to write this story so I drove out to the main drag (I got my junior license only last week) all by myself, and I took that pencil and notebook along and was all set to begin at the beginning. I mean with the description of the place. It was a bitchen day, too. The sun was out and all that, even though it was near the end of November. But then, we are living in Southern California and if you wouldn't look at the calendar you'd hardly know the difference—honest!

Gidget is a surfer-girl novel, written by the real-life father of the original gidget (gidget, we learn, is a surfer palindrome for "girl midget"). A discussion of the book and of the California surfer subculture of 1957 in "Gidget Makes the Grade," in Life magazine (October 28, 1957) reveals another instance of bitchen in that subculture:

The book tells how Gidget learned the difficult art of surfboarding—catching the "bitchen wetbacks" (big waves) and "shooting the curls" (riding the surf) without "getting the ax" (falling under a breaker). An indomitable girl, Gidget finally masters the board.

I don't recall ever having encountered the term wetbacks except as an derisive (and offensive) name for braceros—unlicensed Mexican nationals who cross over the U.S.-Mexican border to pick crops and perform other hard labor in the United States. (The term wetback refers to their having supposedly crossed the border (illegally) by swimming across the Rio Grande, which forms the entire border between Texas and Mexico from Brownsville/Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso/Ciudad Juarez in far west Texas.

In any event, the positive sense of bitching can apply to bitch as well, as this glossary entry in "The Parlance of Hip," in Esquire, volume 52 (1959) indicates:

BITCH: something very good. Example: That song is beautiful. That musician has a bitchin' ear. Bitch also means girl or woman, but not in a derogatory sense. Example: I've got me a fine bitch.

The "not in a derogatory sense" language here may be intended to indicate that a a person using the term may not mean to convey the idea that the girl or woman so designated is unpleasant or unattractive in any way, but the notion that "bitch" is therefore not derogatory appears to be a relic of a particular (and peculiar) male view of the subject at the height of the Mad Men era.

And a glossary in the Saturday Evening Post, volume 234 (1961) has this entry for bitching, along with entries such as "like wow," "like cool, man," and "swinging":

bitching — joyous term, as in: "I had a bitching (or joyous) time."

Wentworth & Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (1960) find an even earlier antecedent for bitching in a positive sense in bitchey:

bitchy, bitchey adj. 1 Having the attributes of a bitch. 2 Striking in appearance; classy. 1930: "A pearl-gray Stutz, a bitchey roadster, all right." J[ames] T. Farrell, 137. Some c1930 use.

The Farrell citation comes from a short story called "Looking 'Em Over" (1930).

It's not impossible that the use of bitchin' in 1950s surfer lingo directly recalls the early 1930s usage of bitchey in a similarly upbeat sense. But it may be even more likely that the adjective bitching (or its more elaborate sibling son-of-a-bitching), popularized by soldiers during World War II and the Korean War, provided the inspiration for the newly positive bitchin'. In any event, it seems truer to attribute its origin to the surf lingo of Southern California in the late 1950s than to student use, as Lighter unaccountably does after noting its early occurrence in Gidget.