From today's SMBC (click for the full panel):
The OED's entry for whoa hasn't been updated since 1924, but the Wiktionary entry has
2. An expression of surprise.
Most examples of "like, whoa" involve quotative be like, as in this gem from 1990:
Nick B. Williams Jr., "Woman's Spirited Escape: 'We Were, Like, Whoa! So Weird' : Refugees: San Fernando Valley native braved tanks and table tennis on trek from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia", L.A. Times 8/29/1990:
The Iraqi army came to Kuwait four days before Michelle Mateljan of Studio City, Calif., was to fly out for a vacation in Spain.
"I was so bummed," she said Tuesday.
Now safe in Bahrain, Mateljan recounted her ordeal, including a final scare at the last Iraqi checkpoint at the Saudi Arabian border.
"There were six or seven soldiers, and we thought, 'This is it,' " the 22-year-old brunette recalled over a plate of pasta. "So what happens? They gave us a can of beans and some chocolate bars. We were, like, whoa! So weird."
But I'm pretty sure that I heard "like whoa man", with the discourse-particle version of like, more than once in the 1960s.
An intermediate step along whoa's journey from horse-command to expression of surprise would have been a metaphorical request to stop or reverse a horse-less action or interaction, e.g.
Sidney Kingsley, "Night Life: In Three Acts" (publication dated 1966, but the play was performed on Broadway in 1962):
I imagine that this usage must have begun pretty much as early as the horse-command did, but a quick search didn't turn up any examples from Melville's time.
The aftercomic for today's SMBC is also worth a linguistic look.
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