Sydney J Harris is an American Journalist and Author, who wrote a syndicated column, Strictly Personal, from 1944-86.
In NLP, within the Meta Model (part of Communication), this pattern (eg. ‘Life is hard’) is also noted, and it is called a Comparative Deletion. Sydney’s response ‘Compared to what?’ is one of the ways we can retrieve more information or understanding about this person’s model of the world.