On the telephone, and fixing a time

The list for a call that has to be made. Near the top is laisser un mot, and un mot is doing something English « word » cannot. It is the word in a sentence, and it is also the short written note somebody leaves behind: je t’ai laissé un mot sur la table, elle m’a envoyé un petit mot, and le mot d’excuse is the note a parent writes to a school. « She left a word on the table » is not English. But the sense is not foreign to English either — it is fossilised in one phrase: « to leave word », as in « he left word that he would be late », which is exactly laisser un mot with the article gone. So the construction an English reader needs is one their own language still has, in a phrase they can no longer take apart.