Is there a better way to write 'do-it-yourselfer'?

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'?

Solution 1:

I think you're right that do-it-yourselfer looks a bit like (do it (yourself er)), but in practice I don't think this is a problem. Do-it-yourself is well-established as a single lexical item, and *yourselfer is nonsense. As a result, I think it's obvious that the suffix -er has scope over (do it yourself) and not just (yourself). (Try reading it aloud: does the spelling really change how you interpret it?)

Unfortunately, do-it-yourself isn't usually spelled *doityourself, and the suffix -er is usually attached directly to words with no intervening hyphen, so do-it-yourselfer is the expected form. However, I think there's some latitude to break the -er rule and insert a hyphen, so I decided to search COCA for do-it-yourself-er. Here are my search terms and the number of results for each query:

do-it-yourself     720
do-it-yourselfer   47
do-it-yourself-er  1
doityourself       1
doityourselfer     0
doityourself-er    0

(I'm not sure, but I think it's possible that the single result for do-it-yourself-er was the result of breaking the word across two lines, so it's possible that there were zero actual results for that search term.)

Based on the above, I think it's best to stick with do-it-yourselfer. Still, if you don't mind defying convention and strongly dislike do-it-yourselfer, I think do-it-yourself-er is a credible alternative.

Solution 2:

In British English, it is just as common - if not more so - to see DIY rather than do-it-yourself. Consequently DIYer or DIY-er would be quite acceptable in many contexts.

Alternatively, you could rephrase it to someone who prefers DIY or something similar.

Solution 3:

In Canadian English, this type of person is commonly referred to as a Handy Man, which is also a term referring to anyone whose secret weapon is duct tape.

There's really nothing wrong with "do-it-yourselfer", but I personally prefer "handy man".

Addendum
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Solution 4:

I'd say "a do-it-yourself enthusiast". or a diy enthusiast.