Why do pencil sharpeners always have to break the points off pencils?

Factual Questions
1

This has been driving me nuts for years. You know those hand-held pencil sharpeners that consist of a blade about 2 cm long screwed to a holder with a hole for the pencil?

I can never even get a good sharp point on the pencil before the tip of the lead breaks off. As many times as I try to sharpen, no matter how carefully, the tip breaks and I’m back where I started. The torment of Sisyphus is an appropriate metaphor to invoke here.

Am I doing something wrong? What is the successful technique for using these confounded torture devices? I don’t remember having this problem as a schoolboy when I used these cheap sharpeners all the time. It’s just in the last 12 years or so. Are they using inferior pencil leads now?

Or do I just have to shell out $$$ for a spiffy electric sharpener?

2

Sounds like a filfthy capitalist plot to force the pencilled masses to purchase more pencils.

3

Those sharpeners only work for the pencils with the “soft wood”, or where its shavings never falls apart when you sharpen the pencil.

4

So you’re saying I need to buy the right kind of pencils for the sharpeners to work right. Tell me, how do you identify this kind of pencil?

5

So I am sittng here, remembering 8th grade mechanical drawing.

We had to buy a pencil sharpener, a lead holder and a piece of sandpaper.