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But am still not convinced I've abused any definitions here. Do you disagree?

I do.

The term Evolution has a very specific set of requirements in scientific terms. "Descent with modifications" includes two terms of art, and does not mean what it means in ordinary English. [Which could refer to, say, a nude coming down a staircase as she combs her hair.]

In particular, descent with modifications does not refer to "things not alive, becoming things which are."

That is not an evolutionary process, and no biologist would claim that it is.

Young Earth Creationists and other scientific illiterates deliberately confuse these two things. In fact, they deliberately confuse the materialist program in general with "evolution." That is what in fact is being done in the instant case of this article. Why? To suggest that the theory of evolution, which is about as irrefutably established as anything we know in biology should be thrown in with speculations about the origins of life, which are not even working hypotheses, let alone scientific theories yet.

We presently cannot draw a straight line from The Singularity at the beginning of time to human life. That doesn't mean that the physics of everything that's happened within a [conservatively] microsecond after The Singularity isn't pretty well understood. It doesn't invalidate anything we know about the formation of stable structures billions of years ago, and it doesn't void the theory of evolution.

Claiming we know how life began, or how living things "evolved" from non-life is playing into the hands of ignoramuses. It shouldn't be done.

FredZarguna: "Claiming we know how life began, or how living things 'evolved' from non-life is playing into the hands of ignoramuses.
It shouldn't be done."

Certainly we don't know everything, but that doesn't mean we know nothing, or that informed speculation is completely worthless.
What we know for certain is evidence of organic material dating back 3.7 billion years, near the beginning of the Earth, followed by pre-biotic or biotic stromatolite fossils going back 3.5 billion years.
From that point evidence shows obvious life becoming steadily more complex.

Of course, how all this happened, we don't know, but that it happened, we certainly do, and informed speculation currently begins with certain organic molecules which can, under certain conditions, replicate themselves.

I merely pointed out that self-replication, along with natural selection, is the core definition of basic evolution, a definition which can be applied, certainly informally, to most anything, living or not.

Pre-Cambrian stromatolite from Glacier Park, Montana.

By the way, my guide to all this is Addy Pross:

Claiming we know how life began, or how living things "evolved" from non-life is playing into the hands of ignoramuses. It shouldn't be done.

Aren't the "irreducible complexity" proponents that claim to have proved mathematically that evolution is impossible doing the same thing?

You can't establish a mathematical proof unless you can account for all the variables. By claiming to have established that proof, they're implicitly claiming to know what all those variables are and that they have been accounted for.