OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[zeppenwolf]

In the emacs I get by typing "emacs" in the OSX unix shell prompt, I
get an instance of emacs which has the "meta" stroke bound to the
"esc" keyboard key.

Clearly, this is preposterous, right?  How can I bind the meta stroke
to the option key?  I'd like to learn emacs and answer my own
question, but one can't easily get through the tutorial without a
workable meta key!

Eden

PS:  It (emacs) doesn't seem to work very well in other ways... keys
dropped, stalling, just generally poo behaviour.  I can live with all
that; I'm just hoping to refresh/learn emacs while waiting for
customers on my job, but it's surprisingly fraught with issues.  ISTR
having a version of emacs which ran on my System 7 (!) machine much
better than this one...