OK, I'll bite. Do you live or work in an environment where you could call someone ignorant and be understood to mean only that there is some specific bit of knowledge they don't posses, without making a larger accusation of intellectual incompetence?

Where?

I try to be sensitive to issues of usage like this because civility does not come easily to me, and I have to be careful of what I say lest I inadvertently offend. And I am confident that when I have heard the word used, it is almost invariably in the larger sense. Use in the narrow sense tends to be by foreigners, who seem to be looking for a translation into English, and could easily not know the broader implied meaning.