Symbol processing

Although this week was very exhausting due to "normal life", I had some time to enjoy again the thought that minds can be seen as complex symbol processing machinery. There are mainly two questions associated with this idea: How do symbols look like and how do we deal with these symbols inside our nervous system ?
One class or categories of symbols are simply words themselves ! I am just thinking on how words might have evolved, and how amazing it must have been ... First, there were the basic words to describe food places, dangers and interests. "Here's the ham, there is the dinosaur, be carefull it will get cold, and I will protect you !" Might be one of the first idea's or symbols that we expressed by using words ! If we jump couple of ten-thousands years back to today, it is funny to think about how limiting words are to communicate complex modern-day emotions, such as expressing sympathy or disgust, and how our internal mechanisms might even try to take other words, to hide the actual cause, as has been discovered by Sigmund Freud.
But we need many other symbols as well, words are not very well suited if we want to communicate about dynamic events, for example to tell the football player how to shoot a ball, the pilot how to fly an airplane and the musician how to play piano. Then we use gestures, computer simulators or compact discs.