The function `f(x)` takes a string input `x` and performs the following operations:
1. If `x` contains any alphabetic characters (a-z or A-Z), it replaces the second character with the letter 'h' and the third character with the letter 'p'. 
2. If `x` contains any numeric characters (0-9), it replaces all numeric characters with the word 'zero'. 

[CODE]:
```python
def f(x):
    if any(c.isalpha() for c in x):
        x = x[:1] + 'h' + 'p' + x[3:]
    if any(c.isdigit() for c in x):
        x = 'zero'
    return x
```