When I try to start OpenOffice, it tells me that it doesn't know which language to use. Refuses to start. I want American English. I could have sworn that I saw the GB(British English) language pack download, then the US one. Maybe this caused an issue? I was never asked to select a language. Can't do anything.

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better. Examining the information you have given, this does not appear to be a bug report so we are closing it and converting it to a question in the support tracker. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but it would make more sense to raise problems you are having in the support tracker at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu if you are uncertain if they are bugs. For help on reporting bugs, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs .

$ sudo synaptic
from there, reinstall openoffice.org

go to System>>Administration>>Language Support
and make sure that "English" is checked.

post if the problem persists

One thing that I would like to know is how they decided which Greek is ancient and which is modern in the language packs. 1453 seems to be a somewhat arbitrary cut-off date, smack-dab in the middle of the renaissance period (well, actually somewhat closer to the beginning than the end).