Ah, that's one of the (many) reasons I love being in the Open Source 
business -- we get to help people feel better.  :-)
>But I doubt
>if my correction will reverse the tide of misuse.
IIRC, the menu items for this feature in AbiWord are:
  Format / Align / Left, Right, Center, Justify
And the tooltips for the corresponding toolbar buttons are:
  Left alignment
  Center alignment
  Right alignment
  Justify paragraph
I don't speak most of the other 8 languages AbiWord's been translated to, so 
I can't definitively reassure you about those, but it looks like we've done 
our part for English at least. 
Enjoy!
Paul