"Loose/release/shoot an arrow" or "shoot a bow" are all possible variations that avoid the use of "fire".
an ngram search provides some clues to the usage. "shoot" seems to be the commonest usage however all the others are possible.
As for the movies using "fire!", I don't know about Frozen but at least in the other two the people involved would have been using a different language, not English, so any speech in the movies can be considered as a modern translation and, as long as you consider the use of "fire an arrow" acceptable in modern times, it should be acceptable in the "translated" speech of the movies.
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
According to Wikipedia, Pratchett has spent much of his life in the southwestern part of England, growing up in Buckinghamshire, and living in Somerset and Wiltshire. The use of -s in many verb forms (and not just in the 3rd person singular) is a dialect feature in this region.
Peter Trudgill writes in Dialects:
Like many regional dialects in England, this feature is well along the process of being displaced by the dialect of London and the southeast, but hangs on in the more remote and rural areas.
Pratchett doesn't have a well-worked-out system of dialects in his Discworld novels. Instead, he applies a variety of features somewhat haphazardly to indicate that a character speaks a non-standard dialect. Here are some examples of characters from widely separated parts of the Discworld demonstrating this grammatical feature:
Pratchett's other techniques for indicating non-standard dialect include eye dialect:
G dropping:
And H dropping: