I find English punctuation wholly unsatisfactory in times like these. I want to add an '-er' to the phrase 'do it yourself', to refer to someone who does things himself instead of hiring out the work to a professional builder, and the best I can come up with is
do-it-yourselfer
The reason this is unsatisfactory is that, if I add parentheses to show the structure (using the parentheses the way you would in a mathematical formula) I'd come up with something like this:
((do it yourself)er)
Having hyphens between the words of 'do it yourself' seems fine, but then the '-er' attached directly to the word 'yourself' suggests this structure
(do it ((yourself)er))
which is obviously wrong.
Do we have any better option than 'do-it-yourselfer'?