I really don't think it's fair to say it's a terrible language. It does have some terrible, horrible parts. But it also has some wonderful, awe-inspiring, mind-blowing parts. It's just not a MOR language - you have extreme lows and awesome highs.
I would say that Javascript is not too bad a language because it has those nice parts. But overall, it's still a language that feels weird given all the bad parts.
I still don't get around how `this` can be so broken.
closures, prototypical inheritance, the syntax for object/array literals. and I know it's not strictly part of the language, and it's deeply unfashionable to say so, but I'm quite a fan of the DOM, too.
Closures and literals are pretty basic things for many languages and very well-known.
Prototypical inheritance may have gotten much more exposure via JS, but I'm not overly impressed with it, and I hardly think it makes up for the rest of the language.